India

In yet another comprehensive piece for Resource Investor Aheadoftheherd.com host and Northern Venture Group President Rick Mills discusses the issue of global resource insecurity. Pointing out a long list of “serious concerns in regards to global resource extraction that we need to consider,” Mills’ piece zeroes in on costs, resource nationalism, civil unrest directed towards mining, and the role of urbanization and population growth particularly in countries like China and India, as well as on the African continent.

Mills predicts that:

“[a]ccessing a sustainable, and secure, supply of raw materials is going to become the number one priority for all countries. Increasingly we are going to see countries ensuring their own industries have first rights of access to internally produced commodities and they will look for such privileged access from other countries.”

He concludes:

“The supply of most commodities is going to tighten. This undeniable fact should be on everyone’s radar screen. Is it on yours? If not, it should be.”

Thankfully, there are signs that the issue is increasingly appearing on Washington DC policymakers’ radar screens – let’s hope momentum keeps building for a the formulation of a comprehensive U.S. mineral strategy in light of the many challenges we’re facing in this area.

Dwarfed by Chinese production today, it may be hard to imagine that India was once the world’s leading Rare Earths producer. The country is now trying to gain foot hold in a market it dominated in the 1950s, and is hoping to benefit from a territorial dispute in the East China Sea.

In the wake of mounting tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, India, which had previously agreed to supply Japan with Rare Earths, has sought to intensify cooperation with Japan in this field. As Metal Miner reports, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to ink an agreement kicking off joint REE exploration in India during a forthcoming trip to Tokyo later this year.

Says MetalMiner contributor Sohrab Darabshaw:

“India is trying its best now to ensure that China’s loss, at least on Japan’s front, will be its gain. Also, what is fuelling India’s interests is that an alignment over REE could well mean putting up a formidable geo-strategic wall to halt increasing Chinese assertiveness in the region on other fronts like territory and trade and commerce.”

While the geopolitical dimension of securing supplies of critical metals and minerals is not lost on the above-referenced players, the realization that resource policy does not occur in a vacuum has yet to sink in in Washington, D.C.. Hopefully, once the dust from this Presidential election cycle settles, U.S. policy makers will realize that it’s time to formulate a comprehensive mineral resource strategy.

An interesting article in a South African weekly discussing the upcoming African Mining Indaba, an annual conference now in its 18th year with the stated goal of bringing investors in to help fuel investment into African mining, caught our eye this week. With more than 6,500 delegates expected at this year’s Indaba, next month’s event [...]

India aims to increase its GDP by $210 billion from the mining and mineral sector by 2025, as outlined in a recent government strategy paper, according to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly.  While resource consumption in India has been on the rise, the paper laments that “performance has been poor both in input and output parameters [...]

American Resource’s Copper Month may have ended, but copper demand continues to show strength, in spite of a global economy that is anemic at best.  Reuters reports a rapid depletion of current copper stocks, contrary to the macro-economic news of slowing global growth.  American Resources will leave month-to-month fluctuations in copper and other metals markets [...]

The Indian Express ran an excellent article this week on India’s efforts to develop a mineral strategy.  The piece gives a broad overview on the global context of the critical mineral mining environment from an Indian perspective. It points out that China not only accounts for more than 90 percent of global REE supply, but [...]

As China continues its geopolitical rare earths power play, Japan and India are the latest countries to partner in an attempt to offset China’s near total supply monopoly.  According to the Asia News Network, the foreign ministers of the two countries agreed in late October to promote the joint development of the critical minerals at [...]

In today’s globalized world, it doesn’t take a seat at the decision-making table for one nation to influence another’s domestic policies – a near-monopoly on critical mineral resources will do.  A case in point is India, which, after a seven-year hiatus, is expanding its indigenous Rare Earth Element (REE) production over growing concerns that China [...]

According to news reports, India has discovered what its government claims could be the world’s largest uranium reserves in a mine due to start operating by the end of the year.  The nation’s Department of Atomic Energy recently confirmed that the Tumalapalli mine in the southern state of Andrha Pradesh holds 49,000 metric tons of uranium, [...]

On the heels of the discovery of a significant rare earths find in Madagascar announced by Mumbai-based Varun Industries earlier this month, the Indian government has been quick to lock up a purchase agreement with the Madagascar unit of the company, Varun Energy Corp.  According to the memorandum of understanding, Varun Energy Corp. will sell [...]