A summary of insights from the Council's first 2026 webinar series on collaboration, processing, and value chains.
The race to secure critical minerals is well underway — but mining is only the beginning. The real prize, and the real bottleneck, lies in what happens next: processing, refining, and beneficiation. A panel of global experts convened recently by the Council for Critical Minerals Development in the Global South, in partnership with Duke University's Nicholas Institute and Sustainable Energy for All, made one thing clear: the Global South cannot afford to keep exporting raw materials and importing finished products. The question is how to change that — and fast.
The Geopolitical Window Is Open, But Won't Stay That Way
Dr. Vlado Vivoda of the University of Queensland framed the challenge in stark terms. The world is not just experiencing heightened US-China-EU competition, it is transitioning away from globalization towards "managed interdependence," with critical minerals at the center. China's vertically integrated, state-coordinated model has come to dominate global processing and value chains. The US is pursuing security-driven diversification and onshoring. The EU is pushing sustainability and traceability standards. These competing models, Vivoda argued, create bargaining power for resource-rich nations — much like the Non-Aligned Movement that navigated the Cold War.
But he was equally direct about the risks. Fragmentation doesn't eliminate dependency; it can simply reconfigure it. Countries that fail to act will risk locking themselves into a single source supply chain architecture or lose the window to diversify altogether. "In a fragmented world," he concluded, "coherence becomes a form of power."
Coherence, in his framing, means aligning policy, infrastructure, finance, and industrial strategy to make beneficiation not just desirable but viable. It also means securing the basic foundations that are too often overlooked: cheap and reliable energy, stable governance, and policy consistency that outlasts election cycles. Processing industries, he stressed, are built over decades, not years.
India's Path: Aggregate Demand, Mandate Processing, Collaborate
Mr. Debasish Nanda, former Business Development Director of Coal India, offered a candid assessment of India's position. India is not naturally endowed with most critical minerals — making them, in his words, "critically critical." The country's demand for these minerals is growing but fragmented, pushing buyers toward China simply because no single Indian entity has sufficient scale to attract alternatives.
His prescription was threefold. First, the government should aggregate demand across industries to reach a critical mass that justifies investment in domestic processing and overseas exploration. Second, any Indian company acquiring mineral assets abroad should be required by policy to process those minerals either in the host country or back in India rather than selling to a third party. Third, India must invest seriously in R&D for processing technology, and pursue broad international collaboration, North-South and South-South alike — rather than waiting for self-sufficiency.
Africa: Rich in Minerals, Early in Processing
Dr. Jennifer Broadhurst of the University of Cape Town provided the African perspective, and while the opportunities are significant, she emphasized that this realization remains in early stages. More than 75% of sub-Saharan Africa's mineral resources are exported in raw or minimally processed form. Advanced processing exists primarily in South Africa — precious metal refining, ferro-alloys, steel — and even there, manufacturing capacity has declined sharply over the past two decades, with many smelters closed or held under maintenance.
The continent's greatest opportunities lie in areas where mineral endowment is globally distinctive: green hydrogen and fuel cells leveraging Africa's 80–90% share of global PGMs; battery and battery precursor production drawing on cobalt, manganese, and graphite; vanadium flow batteries; and titanium beneficiation. Several national strategies have been published — including South Africa's critical minerals strategy and Namibia's beneficiation strategy — and two notable regional innovation hubs are operational: the Hydrogen South Africa (HISA) program and the African Center for Advanced Battery Research.
But progress has been slow. Broadhurst noted that at the recent African Mining conference in February 2026, "there was a lot of talk" but genuine struggle with how to convert ambition into action. She also pushed back on the framing of "responsible sourcing" favored by importing nations, preferring instead to speak of "responsible development" — a distinction that matters deeply when communities bear the direct costs of extraction and processing.
A Four-Step Framework for Collaboration
Dr. Aditya Ramji of the Global South Centre at UC Davis offered a four-step approach for any country thinking about how to position itself in critical mineral processing:
Step one: Understand your position in the value chain. Are you resource-endowed for a given mineral? If so, a refining and midstream strategy makes sense. If not, consider whether domestic capital can find a home in international partnerships that build assets in the global supply chain.
Step two: Secure technology. China dominates refining technology today, but before its emergence, seven of the ten leading refining equipment providers were European. That capability still exists and is accessible, particularly as China deploys technology export controls as a geopolitical tool. Cost competitiveness has been the barrier — but the geopolitical context is changing the calculus.
Step three: Think regionally before thinking globally. If processing cannot happen within a country due to geographic or economic constraints, can it happen within the economic region? Southeast Asia — Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others — offers a model worth studying, with a diverse spread of minerals that could support a regional value chain.
Step four: Consider recycling and recovery alongside primary refining. The hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes used in refining share significant technological overlap with recycling. Any country can invest in recycling and recovery regardless of mineral endowment — and doing so creates greater utilization of the same asset across multiple stages of the value chain.
Can Emerging Economies Catch Up?
Ramji also tackled the question of whether the "China playbook" is still available for other countries. His answer: partly yes, but the timeline is much shorter. China's dominance was built over 25 years of consistent strategy, starting not with mining or refining but with end-use technology manufacturing — today accounting for 70% of global EV production and most of the installed battery capacity. Having captured demand, controlling upstream supply chains became the logical next step.
The playbook applies, but today's would-be competitors have far less time. That means greater policy coordination, faster industry action, and a willingness to accept lower short-term margins in exchange for long-term strategic positioning. Ramji pointed to India's lesser-known success in air conditioner manufacturing post-COVID as an example of corporate action driving government policy — rather than waiting for the government to lead.
The Bottom Line: Cooperation Over Competition
Across all four panelists, one theme ran consistently: no country can go it alone. The current global order may be fragmenting, but the answer for resource-rich emerging economies is not to replicate China's approach in isolation — it is to coordinate, find comparative advantages, and build regional and cross-regional value chains that are more diversified and more resilient than what exists today.
As Vivoda put it, the markets are out of balance and will naturally seek to correct. That correction can be painful and chaotic or it can be deliberate and collaborative. The choice, for the most part, still belongs to the countries that have the minerals in the ground, and those that have large markets to create demand.
