G7 leaders opened talks in Evian today to establish a permanent critical minerals body, as experts and indigenous leaders warned the drive risks repeating colonial extraction harms.
The 52nd summit of the Group of Seven (G7), running Monday through Wednesday in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains, is expected to produce a permanent secretariat on critical minerals designed to outlast the bloc’s rotating presidencies. France holds the current presidency and has driven the agenda. Finance Minister Roland Lescure has compared the proposed body to the International Energy Agency (IEA), created in the 1970s in response to an oil production monopoly. Paris is the most likely host city, with both the IEA and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as potential institutional homes.
The urgency behind the push is grounded in concrete supply shocks. When China tightened export controls on rare earth elements in October 2025, magnet exports to Europe fell by three quarters, carmakers cut production, and both Europe and the United States each faced an estimated $1.5 trillion in direct economic losses, according to analysis published this week by the Atlantic Council. Europe sources 85 percent of its light rare earth elements and 98 percent of its rare earth magnets from China, across sectors that include electric vehicles, wind turbines and defence systems.
But a broad coalition of experts, indigenous leaders and African civil society analysts is warning that an accelerated minerals push would replicate harms already visible across the countries that hold the deposits. More than half of the world’s critical mineral reserves sit on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands, and industrial development, including mining, now threatens nearly 60 percent of Indigenous territories across 64 countries, according to research cited by the groups.
Edson Krenak, of the Krenak Peoples of Brazil and Brazil programme manager at Cultural Survival, said investors and governments that disregard indigenous voices would multiply their own risks and embed instability into projects. He noted that community conflicts had already caused costly delays to mining operations globally.
Professor Julie Klinger of the University of Delaware challenged the premise that new extraction was necessary at all. A recent study found the United States could meet more than 90 percent of its domestic critical minerals demand through materials already sitting above ground at old mining sites, she said, calling the notion of critical mineral scarcity manufactured rather than absolute.
“You can’t build a stable ‘green’ economy on a foundation of local environmental destruction,” said Aryanto Nugroho, national coordinator of Publish What You Pay Indonesia, which monitors transparency in the extractive sector. He questioned the legitimacy of a body controlled by wealthy consumer nations setting the rules for a global minerals framework.
For African nations that hold major deposits, the concern is economic as much as environmental. Dr. Claude Kabemba, an African policy analyst with more than two decades of experience on resource governance, said extraction would deliver little to host communities as long as it followed the pattern of raw mineral exports rather than local processing and finished manufacturing. He called on the G7 to support Africa’s push for industrialisation anchored in its own mineral wealth.
Lauren Hermanus, who co-founded Southern Transitions, a think tank focused on fair energy transitions in the Global South, argued that the resilience of G7 supply chains could not be assessed in isolation from the stability of the countries producing the inputs. Extraction that eroded political and economic foundations in mineral-rich nations, she said, would ultimately increase risk across the entire global economy.
Kenya, alongside Brazil, India, South Korea and Syria, has been invited as a partner to the Evian summit. Whether the gathering produces binding institutional commitments on a permanent secretariat or another political declaration without an operational mandate remains the central question heading into Tuesday’s full session.
Source: newsghana.com