CHAPTER THREE

Delocalised pollution

RATHER THAN TAKE THE LEAD IN RARE METALS, THE WEST CHOSE TO SHIFT ITS production and accompanying pollution to poor countries willing to sacrifice their environment for financial gain.

I decided to see this for myself. One morning in 2011, leaving the buzz of Las Vegas, I headed south-west along Interstate 15 — that straight asphalt strip cutting across the vast expanses of Nevada and California. Two hours later, I found myself looking down a quarry in the midst of a corroded industrial wasteland, a tired star-spangled banner ruffling overhead. Until 1990, US mining company Molycorp operated in this depression of rocks and shrubs that is the Mountain Pass mine. It is also the biggest rare-earth mine on the planet.

When the US dominated the rare-earth metals market

Contrary to popular belief, rare metals reserves are not concentrated in the world’s most active mining countries, such as China, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, or South Africa.1 They are spread across the planet in varying degrees of concentration, making them both rare and not rare. The most strategic of these mineral reserves — rare earths — are found in a dozen or so countries.2 A report by the French parliament states: ‘[B]efore 1965, extraction took place in South Africa, Brazil, and India; but total production was marginal: fewer than 10,000 tonnes per year.’3 Between 1965 and 1985 there was a second phase, during which the United States was the global leader in rare-earth metal mining. The report continues: ‘Although they did not have the monopoly, they were clearly dominant, with quantities as high as 50,000 tonnes per year.’4 Mountain Pass was the mine that supplied these resources.

But the environmental damage caused by Molycorp’s operations began to have a serious impact on the surrounding ecosystems. Clearly, the situation was an embarrassment for group management, for our request to visit the quarry was flatly refused.

So, in an act of desperation, I contacted a light aircraft rental company and informed Molycorp that since I wasn’t allowed to walk through the facility, I would enter their airspace the following day at noon. Accompanying me that day was John Hadder, executive director of a very vocal environmental nonprofit organisation in the region, Great Basin Resource Watch (GBRW).

The next day, from the tarmac of a Las Vegas aerodrome surrounded by mauve-tinted mountains, our rickety plane was catapulted to altitude and, within minutes, we could make out the Molycorp mine in the middle of the mineral landscape. Soon afterwards we were flying over the rocks of the quarry and spiralling down to a body of water.

The most instructive part of the flight extended some 20 kilometres away from the excavation itself: a circular decant pond spread over several hundred metres in the heart of the desert. ‘When the mine was in operation, all the discharged water was channelled to the pond,’ John tells me. ‘This contaminated water is still seeping into the ground water.’

Back on terra firma, in the shadow of a hangar next to the runway, the document John Haddar showed me was edifying: a map of Mountain Pass based on intelligence gathered between 1984 and 1998 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. GBRW must have requested the declassification of this information to allow them to map the ecological damage caused by Mountain Pass’s operations in the Mojave Desert.

What struck me was the succession of numbers reproduced on the map between the excavations and the decant pond. ‘The water polluted by the ore processing was pumped out of the quarry and evacuated into this big pond,’ Hadder explained. Directing the billions of litres of wastewater was a pipeline. ‘The numbers shown here along the pipeline show where there were ruptures or leaks.’ Over fifteen years, some sixty spills occurred. ‘The worst was in 1992: a leak of one and a half million litres! In total, nearly four million litres of wastewater have spilled into the desert.’

This environmental damage hit local communities hard. The soil was contaminated with a noxious blend of uranium, manganese, strontium, cerium, barium, thallium, arsenic, and lead.5 Polluted sand and contaminated groundwater fouled the Mojave Desert for miles around. ‘After a series of lawsuits, the company was forced to tackle the environmental issues head-on,’ John told me. Molycorp was fined heftily.

Once, Molycorp was even paid a visit by armed federal agents, complete with shields and bulletproof vests, to notify the company of yet another violation of California’s environmental protection regulations. And to protect the nearby habitats of the desert tortoise, the mine’s 300 employees were ordered to attend training to learn about the reptile, and were prohibited from coming within 30 metres of them. At the end of the 1990s, fearing new spills and faced with the astronomical cost of modernising their facilities, Molycorp began to reassess the continuation of its operations at Mountain Pass.

Meanwhile, a China that was thirsty for economic growth saw in this challenging period for Western mining companies an opportunity to become a dominant player in the rare metals market. This was an ambition not without substance, for its mines in Baotou (see Chapter One) represented nearly 40 per cent of the world’s rare metal reserves. To accelerate the shift of mining production from West to East, China used — and continues to use — formidable cunning that is captured in just one word: dumping. It engaged in trade dumping by slashing production costs; and environmental dumping because, as environmental activist Ma Jun explains, ‘production costs do not factor in the cost of repairing the environmental damage’. And has China done anything at all to even paper over the damage?

Naturally, this dual-dumping strategy dragged down Beijing’s prices, and by 2002 a kilogram of rare-earth metals produced in China had an average cost price of US$2.80 — half that in the US.6 Molycorp did not stand a chance against this ruthless competition, and shut down its operations at Mountain Pass, running down its stocks until finally closing the mine in 2002.

An environmentally ethical approach would have been to set aside the quest for financial gain by subsidising, albeit at a loss, rare metals mining in Western countries where ecological responsibility held currency. This was a responsibility that could have fallen to Australia. In 2001, a wealthy Australian businessman, Nicholas Curtis, acquired Mount Weld — one of the biggest rare-earth deposits on the planet, located in the state of Western Australia. ‘Curtis believed these materials would become highly strategic given the diversity of their applications, be it for cars, phosphors, or televisions. He founded the junior mining house Lynas to extract cerium, lanthanum, and neodymium from the Mount Weld mine,’ said an expert on the matter.7

But the businessman had to face the fact that Lynas stood no chance of competing against the rock-bottom prices offered by the Chinese. The financial crisis in 2008 further jeopardised the opening of the mine.8 And all the while, the West left the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ of rare metals to his own devices. ‘We in the West knew full well at what cost we were accessing rare-earth metals that were more or less clean, and which posed no risk to their future generations,’ says a French expert. ‘But we preferred to turn a blind eye to what was happening in China.’9

The Americans are not the only ones to have washed their hands of the affair. They share this responsibility with the French.

Hot-air balloons, adventure, and rare earths: the Rhône-Poulenc saga

France, a leading supplier of resources for the third industrial revolution? To jog our memory, let’s take a look back at one of the shining periods of the humble television. In France, many will recall those Saturday nights in the 1980s at around 10.00 pm when everyone gathered around the box to watch Ushuaïha. The show’s presenter was environmentalist Nicolas Hulot, France’s answer to David Attenborough.10 Viewers were transported to far-flung places to encounter little-known peoples, discover exotic animals that would have had Rudyard Kipling green with envy, and drift silently over epic landscapes in the helium-inflated envelope of a hot-air balloon. Broadcaster TF1 sold viewers the dream — while also selling off the little attention they had left. At the very bottom of the screen could be seen the rectangular logo of the program’s official sponsor, French chemical company Rhône-Poulenc, together with the tagline: ‘Welcome to the world of adventure, human feats, and exploits!’

Before its chemical arm became Rhodia in 1998 and it merged with Belgian group Solvay in 2011, Rhône-Poulenc was one of the two biggest rare metals chemical companies in the world.11 In the 1980s, its factory in La Rochelle, in the west of France, purified between 8,000 and 10,000 tonnes of rare earths every year — that is, 50 per cent of their global supply.

This merits repeating: half of the most strategic rare metals — the resources of the future that would shape the energy and digital transition — were beneficiated in France. The country possessed unparalleled chemical knowledge coupled with superior commercial acumen. So much so, in fact, that French intelligence agencies monitored access at the plant just in case a Russian or Chinese guest on a working visit decided to indulge in a bit of industrial espionage.

The La Rochelle plant sits on a 40-hectare site along the coast west of the city. It is still in operation, and I was able to visit it in 2011. In the shadow of colossal warehouses, rare earths are separated and calcined in high-temperature furnaces to produce oxides (powders) that are packaged for the market. In the adjoining warehouses are row upon row of tightly packed bundles stamped with names we are now familiar with: cerium, dysprosium, neodymium, terbium, and so on. There is also an R&D laboratory, but the activity of the refinery itself is a shadow of its heyday twenty-five years ago.

It’s no secret that extracting and refining rare earths produces high amounts of pollution. This is due to their natural association with radioactive elements, such as thorium and uranium. During separation at the La Rochelle plant, radon was released, albeit in minute quantities. Former employees of the French industrial company insist that inhaling the weakly radioactive gas has never had any impact on worker health. Yet ‘[t]here is no such thing as rare-earth minerals that are not radioactive’. And that’s coming from a former director at Rhône-Poulenc.12

The few dozen tonnes of uranium that Rhône-Poulenc separated every year were sold to the national electricity utility EDF for its nuclear power stations. The thousands of tonnes of thorium were, and still are, stored at the plant in the hope that they could one day be used as fuel for a new generation of cleaner nuclear power stations. The effluent by-product of separating the minerals went to a wastewater treatment plant before being discharged into the sea via an outfall pipe located on the shore of Port Neuf, at the end of the bay of La Rochelle.13 The liquid waste had a high concentration of iron, zirconium, aluminium, silicon, magnesium residues, and other impurities. In the 1980s, there were numerous incidents of untreated sludge ‘escaping’ from the wastewater treatment plant to be decanted directly into the sea.

Did these discharges contain radioactive thorium? One former Rhône-Poulenc employee says no: all thorium was stored upstream of the treatment plant — that is, before the evacuation of effluents. He added that any radioactivity would only have emanated from the radium found in thorium and uranium. We should also point out that Rhône-Poulenc went to great lengths to mitigate the inevitable pollution of its operations. But non-governmental organisations (NGOs) believe otherwise, and estimate that since 1947 the plant has evacuated some 10,000 tonnes of radioactive waste into the ocean.

In 1985, a prefectural order toughened environmental regulations and banned Rhône-Poulenc from discharging any effluents through pipelines not submerged at high tide, when waste could be swept away by the sea currents. The order also capped effluent discharges. Nevertheless, at the request of a local green political party, Les Verts Poitou-Charentes, the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (CRIIRAD) conducted several inspections of the facility from 1987. Contrary to official reports, they found that the outflow pipe was in service at both high and low tide. Samples taken in the immediate surroundings of the evacuation channel confirmed ‘extensive discharges and an accumulation of thorium and its progeny in the marine environment’, as stated in a letter from the nonprofit to La Rochelle’s MP and mayor, Michel Crépeau. The radioactivity near the outfall pipe was at 1,000 counts per second, or 100 times the local average. ‘It was a very serious affair,’ says an engineer at CRIIRAD today.14

Not that this ruffled any feathers with the local authorities. ‘Everyone knew [about the radioactivity], starting with the mayor Michel Crépeau. It was regularly reported on by the local press, but nothing was done about it,’ says Hélène Crié, a reporter covering the events at the time for French daily newspaper Libération.15 This contrasts with the position of Professor Pierre Pellerin, director of the French Radiation Protection Agency, which reports to the Ministry of Health: ‘Every so often this business about radioactivity at La Rochelle crops up. If we keep up this nonsense, we are going to send everyone into a panic.’16 Coming from the scientist accused of downplaying the fallout of the radioactive cloud that drifted over France after the Chernobyl disaster, one can’t help but read this with circumspection.17

The environmental conscience of the French in the 1980s was a shadow of what it is today. But locals began to get hot under the collar. Libération wrote: ‘Instructors at the local windsailing club worry that children sailing near that shore could accidentally swallow water or fall and hurt themselves in the contaminated mud. As for the bay as a whole, “because of the currents, it can take up to three weeks for a drop of water that’s entered the harbour to be carried out.”’18 Committees were formed, and at public meetings community members could be heard chanting ‘Rhône-Poulenc is an atomic timebomb!’ and ‘It’s going to blow!’19

Member of Parliament Jean-Yves Le Déaut describes how he went to La Rochelle on two occasions to assess the situation — and was met by nearly 300 protesters with loudhailers. ‘One gentleman came up to me and said: “We’ve been living a peaceful existence here, Mr Le Déaut. And now we are being exposed to radioactivity … People here are starting to get scared.”’20 Jean-Paul Tognet, a former industrial and raw materials director of Rhône-Poulenc and Rhodia Rare Earths, recalls the ‘growing criticism of Rhône-Poulenc’s reputation by the media. Management wanted to pull the plug — the controversy almost shut down the La Rochelle plant.’21

From 1986 to 1998, Rhône-Poulenc was under the management of Jean-René Fourtou. In 1994, he changed tack entirely: ‘I don’t want to hear anything more about radioactivity. Buy whatever you need, but I will not allow a single radioactive product.’22

And with that, Pandora’s box was opened. Rhône-Poulenc (which became Rhodia) found itself looking for foreign partners to carry out first-stage refinement. This is how, one fine day, the group asked Norway, India, and China whether they could make La Rochelle’s non-radioactive products for them.

Were there errors in Rhône-Poulenc’s mineral processing, and were the subsequent plant tours organised for the public too little, too late to redeem their lack of transparency? Did the residents of La Rochelle, with their limited understanding of radioactivity, exaggerate the risks to which they were actually exposed? And did the authorities raise suspicions by attempting to cover up certain information? No doubt everyone has their share of the blame. Either way, during this time other countries got ready to fill the void. ‘In the early 1990s, the Norwegians supplied us with raw materials at high prices,’ says Jean-Paul Tognet. ‘We should have kept the diversity of our supplies, but instead we stopped working with the Norwegians and entered into a long-term partnership with the Chinese, who were more competitive.’

Naturally, buying cheaper improved the French chemical company’s bottom line. It was also profitable for its customers, eager to procure transformed rare earths at rock-bottom prices. It made perfect sense. Jean-Yves Dumousseau, who was sales director at the US chemical company Cytec at the time, explains: ‘Obtaining rare earths from anywhere else would have been far more expensive than continuing to procure supplies from China at a quarter of the price! It’s the same argument for electronics, jeans … everything! I’m sorry to say it, but it was that simple.’23

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away from La Rochelle, China and its annual production of 100,000 tonnes of rare earths claimed the monopoly. As for working conditions, ‘[t]here were no checks on the separation units or even safety procedures; you’d find the guys in the refineries doing electrolysis at 700 degrees without hardhats, wearing flip-flops and shorts! It was outrageous!’ says Dumousseau.24 Another source put it more bluntly: ‘It was a mess, and no one wanted to deal with it.’

A new world order

The Rhône-Poulenc saga brings to mind those who despair of where the world is headed. To find a sense of order in this ‘chaos’, they latch on to clean divides: countries of the north and countries of the south; countries of the east and countries of the west (once separated by the Berlin Wall); emerging countries and developed countries; the Orient and the Occident; the free world versus the axis of evil; ‘Old Europe’ against the vibrant ‘New World’; and so on. But there may be an even deeper divide that began thirty years ago — one that tells the story of the world of our making. It did not follow a treaty in Versailles, a congress in Vienna, or a conference in Yalta. Rather, it is an industrial order that formed organically between China and the West (to polarise once more).

It was first formally acknowledged in the infamous ‘Summers Memo’, an internal document at the World Bank signed in 1991 by its chief economist, Lawrence Summers. He purportedly recommended that developed economies export their polluting industries to poor countries, and especially to ‘underpopulated countries in Africa [that are] vastly under-polluted’, as ‘the economic logic … is impeccable’.25 Anxious to explain himself after the memo was leaked, Summers naturally pleaded intentional sarcasm. Yet his comments are perfectly aligned with the reality: as our societies strive towards ‘zero risk’, all kinds of industrial activities have steadily been pushed out of Europe and the rest of the Western world.26

Consider the example of REACH — the European regulation aimed at minimising the sanitary risks associated with over 30,000 chemicals found in consumer goods.27 It has vastly improved the quality of life of the European Union’s 445 million citizens, and especially that of industrial workers. Then, in 2007, the United States, Canada, and Mexico signed an agreement in Montebello, which also had a public health objective. Under the agreement, the signatories are required to list all chemical products on the North American market.28 But these environmental safety requirements have also taken the wind out of the sails of Western industry, which has had to suspend the production of myriad chemical substances that are now banned.29 Now, others are free to take over production. And become Europe’s suppliers.

The same logic applies to green technologies. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the workload of the future energy and digital transition fell naturally between China, which did the dirty work of manufacturing green-tech components, and the West, which could then buy the pristine product while flaunting its sound ecological practices. Thus, the world was ordered as Larry Summers intended: between the dirty and those who pretend to be clean.

This is precisely the takeaway of the Mountain Pass and La Rochelle sagas: by moving the sourcing of its rare metals to China, the West chose to relocate its pollution.30 We have knowingly and patiently created a system that allows us to move our ‘filth’ as far away as possible, and the Chinese — far from pinching their noses — have welcomed the initiative with open arms. As magnanimously put by a Canadian rare metals industrialist: ‘We can thank them for the environmental damage they have endured to produce these metals in our place.’31

At this point, we should steer clear of any anti-capitalistic arguments: the countries on our radar have adopted this system of their own volition by deliberately shaping their economies to generate massively inflated profits. Many have done well on the progress afforded by the globalisation of the markets. Except now the Chinese have realised something else. A Chinese academic explains: ‘We are praised for moulding to the Western-ruled world order of the time. But China also suffered. And in terms of cost-effectiveness, I am not wholly convinced of the advantages in our favour.’32 Under this arrangement, Beijing has effectively laundered dirty minerals. Concealing the dubious origins of metals in China has given green and digital technologies the shining reputation they enjoy. This could very well be the most stunning greenwashing operation in history.

Naturally, businesses in the West are complicit. ‘They couldn’t care less about the conditions under which the minerals are extracted and refined,’ a European industrialist tells me. ‘All that matters is having the lowest price possible.’ They are also complicit in our ignorance of the human dramas at play behind the scenes of the energy and digital transition. In the 2018 annual report by US behemoth Apple, a major consumer of rare metals, the words ‘rare earths’, ‘minerals’, or ‘metals’ do not appear.33 As for Tesla, the biggest name in electric vehicle manufacturing, its 2019 environmental report is extremely discreet when it comes to these resources. The artisanal cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo are mentioned, but nothing is said of their environmental impact.34

Consumers could have led the resistance: their choice to buy or boycott has the power to redirect the market and change its practices. They had the information: numerous documentaries have exposed the distressing environmental and social impact of electronic goods, as have countless NGO reports.35 Consumers would have needed to put pressure on manufacturers to design more ecological products, such as the repairable Fairphone,36 and to use their votes to pressure their governments to beef up feeble anti-obsolescence regulations. But consumers would hear nothing of it: a connected planet was better than a clean one. But there is hope. New consumer rights regulations have emerged, such as the law passed in 2015 in France that requires manufacturers to inform consumers about the availability of spare parts. In the United States, the ‘right to repair’ movement is gathering pace; it requires electronic goods manufacturers to allow consumers to fix their products by providing them with repair manuals, for instance.37

Such citizen-led initiatives to repair domestic appliances have mushroomed. Another one is the Restart Project. Since its creation in 2013, the London-based social enterprise has organised thousands of events around the world where participants learn how to repair their electronic goods.38 And in the US, iFixit is an online platform with over 50,000 free tutorials on how to repair anything from mobile phones to connected cars.39

Today, Europe and the US want their whites whiter than white, with the EU setting out the ambitious 2030 climate and energy framework,40 and the US beating its carbon dioxide emissions-reduction record in 2017.41 Yet how could Europe possibly hope to achieve its targets if its polluting industries came home? Environmental responsibility has already been transferred, and it’s not a transaction we will be reversing anytime soon.42 Therefore, is the West — brandishing its self-declared legitimacy — truly in a position to lead talks on the fight against global warming? Shouldn’t COP 21 have been held in Beijing, Kinshasa, or Astana rather than in Paris? And is France really in a position to urge, as President Macron did, that we ‘Make Our Planet Great Again’?

The truth is that we are no better than companies that boast colossal earnings to their shareholders — while hiding a mountain of debt in an obscure subsidiary in the Caribbean. These ‘off-balance-sheet’ transactions that use fraudulent accounting practices have led to the conviction of countless company directors. We glorify our modern ecological legislation — while shipping out our electronic scrap to toxic waste dumps in Ghana, exporting our radioactive waste to the ends of Siberia, and outsourcing rare metals mining around the world, to make a deadweight loss look like a net profit.

The illusion of a new era of opulence

The zeitgeist of the 1990s played an important role in this reshuffling of roles. At the start of the decade, George Bush and Margaret Thatcher gave wing to the expression ‘peace dividend’. The fall in military spending at the end of the Cold War gave rise to a new era of peace and economic prosperity. One can recall the feeling of optimism — euphoria even — that reigned at the time. With the end of the nuclear arms race came demilitarisation, and the states that had built up stockpiles of rare metals in preparation for an armed conflict were left wondering whether they were worth holding on to.43

A strategic stockpile is like a savings account: when the forecast looks gloomy, we tuck some money away for that rainy day. Naturally, in the bright days of optimism, we dip into our savings and enjoy the sunshine. So, in the 1990s, we witnessed a global sell-off of strategic stockpiles.44 In France, the platinum and palladium stockpiles deposited in the safes of Banque de France were quickly sold off by both left- and right-wing governments. The dozens of billions of dollars’ worth of lithium and beryllium rare earths in the US went the same way.45

This cornucopia largely originated in the former USSR and its satellite states. Palladium stockpiles were sold discreetly and in record numbers via Zurich. As a former asset manager relates: ‘It started with the banks UBS and Credit Suisse, working for end-consumers in the jewellery sector, for instance. Palladium was also bought by trade majors like Glencore and Trafigura.’46 Meanwhile, Beijing pursued a quite different strategy of building its reserves while buying up a handsome portion of the market inventory.

The sudden superabundance of raw materials on offer sent prices into a long-lasting decline that gave the impression of limitless availability — an illusion of an era of abundance given substance by the breaking down of international commodity trade barriers. In the mining sector, businesses cared only about buying metals as cheaply as possible.

It was only a matter of time before this elusive opulence diverted industrial companies from their duty of knowing the origin of the resources they relied on and managing their supply. This is precisely what happened in the lumber industry. In Europe, many producers and artisans no longer know the exact origins of their materials. As production lines have scattered and the distances travelled by timber have grown longer, parquet floor layers, carpenters, and the like have become disconnected from the substance of their trade. The problem is that the day China suddenly decides to snap up French oak, for example, no one will know where to find new suppliers.47

It’s the same story for perfumes. From the 1950s, globalisation and the low cost of labour led to perfume-makers neglecting their flower farms in Grasse, in the south of France, in favour of less noble products from Egypt, India, or Bulgaria. ‘Perfume was sold based on concepts rather than on the quality of ingredients,’ a professional tells me.48 It’s a philosophy that the perfume sector is now reconsidering.

This is also more or less what happened in the industries that use rare metals. The assumption still exists that resources are available in any quantity and at any time. Supporting this utopia are the dogmas of ‘just in time’ and ‘zero stock’. Taught in MBA programs the world over, and applied by big industrial groups, the two production management methods were established in 1962 by Taiichi Ōno, an engineer at the Japanese company Toyota (hence the term ‘toyotism’). ‘Just in time’ is about avoiding surplus stock by making the time between the manufacture of a product and its sale as short as possible, resulting in what is known as ‘lean manufacturing’. Its corollary, ‘zero stock’, outsources the management of spare parts and components to a multitude of contractors — thereby transferring the risks associated with the delivery of raw materials to these third parties.

This complexification of supply chain logistics means that the exact origins of a raw material are not wholly transparent from one end of the supply chain to the other. Instead, participants can see no further than one level upstream and one level downstream. Surely this explains why, in a recent annual report, under the heading ‘raw materials risk’, Thales — a multinational whose rare metals–intensive electronics are used in aerospace, defence, security, and land transport — sanctimoniously states: ‘Given the nature of its business, Thales uses few raw materials. The Group’s exposure to raw materials risk is therefore negligible.’49

Hypocrisy? Ignorance? Either way, toyotism has helped relieve businesses of their responsibility with respect to ‘metals risks’.

An end to public policies on mineral sovereignty

We see this same insouciance and lack of foresight within governments, which have steadily put mining strategies on the backburner. However, before the collapse of the communist bloc, this was not the case for France, as illustrated by the French Geological Survey (BRGM) — a public institution world-famous for its mining expertise. The BRGM even benefited from the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, which also served to familiarise French political leaders with the realities of resource scarcity. In 1978, as an initiative of the French minister of industry, André Giraud, the government launched the ‘Metals Plan’ — a vast mining stock-take aimed at boosting the BRGM’s activities. Former employees nostalgically refer to this period as the ‘golden age of BRGM’, when it had a mining exploration program that enjoyed the active support of the government, especially in metropolitan France and French Guyana.50 Its exploration department had 250 employees, and offered its services in francophone Africa, Portugal, and Quebec.51

In the 1990s, the Metals Plan came to an end, and the dynamic BRGM began to lose its lustre. By 2000, exploration activities were wrapped up, marking the start of what would be called ‘the winter of French mining’.52 ‘To think we had gold, zinc, tungsten, antimony, and silver,’ recalls a former employee, ‘but investors were becoming increasingly rare.’53 The mines that hadn’t already been shut down were abandoned, creating their own lot of social dramas. ‘The mining industry never made up a large part of French GDP,’ says another former employee, ‘but when you add up the few hundred employees per mine, you’re left with a lot of people. At the end of the day, we lost an entire industry. Not to mention our mineral sovereignty, our capacity to supply our industries with our own minerals and metals.’

This underlying trend is common to all Western countries. One need only look at infographics on the history of global mining production. While Europe produced nearly 60 per cent of the world’s heavy metals in 1850, its momentum steadily declined to produce no more than 3 per cent today. Mining production in the US hasn’t fared any better: after peaking in the 1930s, accounting for close to 40 per cent of global production, it now represents around 5 per cent.54

Back in Europe, the three French White Papers on defence and national security produced in 1971, 1994, and 2008 made no reference to the supply of rare metals, despite how critical these materials are to military technology. Only in the 2013 publication did the term first appear.55 It was of little interest to French intelligence agencies. ‘The government never asked the agencies to take any action in this regard. I think the Directorate-General for External Security was light years away from such matters,’ admits former intelligence director Alain Juillet. According to several corroborative sources, however, in the 1970s a former spymaster, Alain de Marolles, convinced the head of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches, to add eight strategic minerals to a metals supply risk list. De Marenches subsequently stepped down, de Marolles was ‘honourably discharged’, and their cause went no further.56

Three decades were enough to bring about an about-turn in strategy. Up until then, a nation’s power hinged largely on its ability to rely on its own vital resources — or, failing that, to do everything in its power to guarantee supply from outside its borders.

Consider the example of oil. In the UK at the start of the twentieth century, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made the decision to convert the Royal Navy from coal to oil. He also did this to secure oil supplies from the Middle East for his country. The British government acquired a controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and crisscrossed Persia with gigantic marine pipelines.

As for the United States, when they realised after the Second World War that their own oil reserves would not be enough to meet their growing energy needs, they turned to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its extraordinary crude oil reserves. The ‘Quincy Pact’, signed on 14 February 1945 between President Roosevelt and the Saudi king, Ibn Saud, gave Washington privileged access to Riyad’s petroleum in exchange for military protection. France looked to Algeria and Gabon in the same way. When it came to food, however, Paris always managed to safeguard part of its sovereignty during World Trade Organization (WTO) talks by limiting the liberalisation of agricultural markets. Just as it safeguarded its civil nuclear program to maintain its energy sovereignty …

For millennia, the fundamental rules of relying on one’s own resources or securing a sustainable supply beyond one’s borders have dictated every strategy for achieving energy autonomy. Yet to date, neither of these has been applied to rare metals. One could argue that the quantities at stake are inconsequential when compared to our gluttonous appetite for oil. But as we have by now discovered, these metals are as discreet as they are indispensable. Even though every person on the planet consumes as little as 20 grams of rare-earth metals a year, the world would run infinitely slower without them. And yet few futurists have looked into how important these minute metals have become as a result of our technological choices since the 1970s. The policy of both demanding and claiming complete dependence on others is now widely accepted, whereas not that long ago it would have been considered utterly ruinous.

This was certainly before the market became so short-sighted, as this US expert says: ‘Western countries no longer have long-term strategies, and rare metals are no exception.’57 There is also the particular French context. France’s mines and its abundant agricultural and fishing resources have made it less averse to dependence than other countries, like Japan, that have had no choice but to develop a trading culture and to find reliable supply routes to compensate for their lack of natural resources. And since France is not a country of traders either, it has not developed a culture of economic intelligence as far as the rare metals market is concerned. Says one specialist: ‘The French DNA is not equipped for a situation of scarcity.’58

In short, the Western world honours the ‘cargo cult’ founded not too long ago in the Pacific Islands. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1940s, the mosaic of Melanesian peoples scattered predominantly across Papua New Guinea, the Fiji Islands, and New Caledonia came into sudden contact with Western societies — first with French and British colonisers seeking gain and conquest, and then with the US Army during the Pacific War. Both sets of fresh occupants of the region needed regular supplies of food and non-food items, so they built logistics networks that linked the spray of islands to the rest of the world.

Just imagine the stupefaction of those ancestral peoples upon seeing the arrival of boats and then planes, their holds loaded with treasures. And their amazement at how easily these goods appeared: all it took were radio operators to fire off their requests for medication, rations, and equipment to land on the fine-sand beaches or be parachuted down from the sky, as if by magic. Naturally, the Melanesians did not have the slightest notion of the industrial fabric woven behind these supplies. But because one apparently needed only to ask in order to receive, they began to imitate the Westerners, designing dummy radio devices, laying fake runways, watching, and waiting — for a very, very long time — for their needs to be met. The Westerners gave these rituals the name ‘cargo cult’.59

In the twenty-first century, on the other side of the world, our societies — as informed and materialistic as they are — are giving in to a similar cult. The genius of logistics has stripped us of a fear that obsessed our ancestors for 70,000 years: that of scarcity. But everything comes at a cost: the globalisation of supply chains gives us consumer goods while taking away knowledge of their origin. We have gained in buying power what we have lost in buying knowledge. Is it any wonder that 16 million adults in the United States think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows?60

But not everyone is displeased as the West sleepwalks its way forward. For by organising the transfer of rare metals production, we have done much more than palm off the rare metals burden to the galley slaves of globalisation. We have entrusted a precious monopoly to potential rivals.