The national secretary of Geology, Mining and Mineral Transformation, Ana Paula Bittencourt, ruled out this Wednesday (25) that Brazil will grant any type of exclusivity in agreements involving critical minerals with other countries.
According to the secretary, who closely follows international negotiations in the sector, this is one of the basic premises presented by the Brazilian government in conversations with foreign partners.
“One of the basic premises is that we sit down to talk to anyone who understands that there will not be exclusivity. Brazil is huge in terms of natural resources and it makes no sense for us to become small, giving up space and losing opportunities with other actors”, he stated, during a debate organized by Iris (Institute of Regulation, Innovation and Sustainability).
The secretary also said that Brazil has been approached by different countries interested in partnerships in the area of critical minerals, which, according to her, reflects the country’s growing protagonism in this market.
“What we are making clear is that the support from the Brazilian government will be for partners who understand the challenge of advancing production chains here,” he stated.
As reported by CNNBrazil has adopted a firmer tone in international negotiations and has started to demand explicit references to technology transfer and productive cooperation in agreements and memorandums of understanding in the mineral sector.
This was the case of the agreements recently signed with Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea, which include mentions of adding value and the development of production chains in the country, although, in practice, these are not agreements with practical economic potential in the short term, as they are memoranda.
Internally, members of the government recognize that advancing to the more complex stages of the chain, such as the manufacture of permanent magnets or batteries, is still a distant objective. These phases require advanced technology, industrial scale and billion-dollar investments.
Still, there is room for the country to advance in intermediate stages, especially in chemical refining and the separation of individual rare earth elements, processes that transform the extracted ore into industrial products with greater added value.
The Brazilian government’s strategy has been to seek rapprochement with emerging countries that have advanced technology or relevant industrial capacity to signal to the great powers that the country intends to advance in more sophisticated stages of the production chain and reduce dependence on the export of raw raw materials.
In assessing the productive sector, the federal government has used critical minerals as a political and diplomatic instrument and taken advantage of agendas in Asia to signal positions to the great powers.
The reading is that these initiatives function as indirect messages to the United States, Europe and China, indicating that Brazil intends to expand its role in the most profitable phases of the mineral industry.
This rapprochement is also seen as a way to reinforce Brazil’s negotiating power with large economies that concentrate technology and capital.
