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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.

As reports about China’s restrictive mineral export policies continue to dominate the resource news cycles, don’t expect Beijing to slow down its aggressive pursuit of access to critical metals and minerals around the world.

According to China Daily’s European edition, senior Chinese industry officials have announced that Chinese miners will accelerate the exploration of overseas sources of nonferrous metals in light of surging domestic demand. Domestic proven reserves of nonferrous minerals are vast, but far from sufficient to meet demand. As one industry representative points out:

“Chinese companies have accelerated their exploration of overseas nonferrous mining resources in recent years, making the country an important driver of the global nonferrous metals industry’s development.”

As of late last year, China already had overseas mining rights to 80 million metric tons of copper, 30 million tons of lead and zinc, and 6 million tons of nickel, but these numbers will likely increase as Beijing pursues further resource development agreements all over the globe, most recently notably in the Arctic and Africa.

China not only has a plan when it comes to securing its access to critical mineral resources, it is already actively implementing its strategy. Meanwhile, in our own attempts to formulate a coherent mineral resource strategy, the U.S. government can’t even agree on a definition of what constitutes a critical mineral – a fact that does not bode well both from a geopolitical or competitiveness standpoint.

In an effort to secure access to critical metals and minerals for its industries, European Commission representatives Antonio Tajani (Vice President), and Andris Piebalgs (Commisisoner for Development Cooperation) have signed a letter of intent on cooperation with Greenland’s Prime Minister Kuupik Kleist. The June 13 letter of intent covers cooperation in the areas of joint [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced stepped-up research efforts into critical metals and minerals. Planning to spend up to $120 million, the department aims to create an “Energy Innovation Hub” with the goal to advance green energy technologies relying on critical mineral resources including (but not limited to) rare earths. Says Secretary of Energy [...]

China’s aggressive pursuit of mineral resources around the globe continues with Africa being a “key destination for meeting China’s resource acquisitiveness,” according to a presentation given at the Coaltrans Southern Africa conference earlier this month. As outlined in an article on MiningWeekly.com, China’s quest for resources in Africa, which centers on oil, gold, platinum, copper, [...]

Underscoring the timeliness of the American Resources-sponsored Strategic Minerals Conference 2012, Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, has a piece on The Hill’s Congress Blog outlining how current domestic mining policies threaten our national security and economy. A few of Burnett’s key points: · The latest WTO case filed [...]

While many of us in the continental U.S. are enjoying record-breaking temperatures this March, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton probably needed her down coat as she embarked on her new mission: laying the groundwork for a common EU policy on the Arctic. Traveling near the North Pole earlier this month, Ashton made a case [...]

Derailing the development of an iron mine in northern Wisconsin, the Democrat-led State Senate earlier this month rejected a bill that would have streamlined the onerous permitting process for mining projects in the state. While environmental concerns were cited as a key reason for rejecting the legislation, the Department of Natural Resources confirmed that it [...]

With this week’s WTO ruling on China’s raw materials exports (visit RareMetalBlog for our very own Daniel McGroarty’s take) all eyes are once again on rare earths – and for good reasons, as these critical elements are the poster child of the challenges associated with resource dependency. However, a broader focus is needed, and tungsten [...]

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and like-minded state legislators are currently attempting to re-write the state’s mining laws to “create certainty in the regulatory process.”  Legislation that would streamline the permitting of iron mines passed the Assembly last week at a vote margin of 59 to 36, with the governor touting the benefits he says passage [...]