As the UK government prepares to launch a new Critical Minerals Strategy, which will seek to secure supplies amidst a global mineral rush, communities on the frontlines of Britain’s mining ambitions speak out.
Obtaining so-called critical minerals is increasingly considered of strategic importance for countries in the global North to meet their green transition and national security objectives. Ahead of the publication of a renewed UK strategy, Cristóbal Rodríguez, national spokesperson for MODATIMA, takes a deep dive into the previous government’s Critical Minerals Strategy, analysing its rhetoric in relation to the reality for mining affected communities in Chile. This comprehensive critique represents a collective call for a change of course rooted in environmental justice and an end to extractivism:
“Upon reviewing and discussing the UK’s Critical Minerals Strategy in depth, it appears to carefully but insistently encourage colonialist and capitalist practices through language that is seemingly friendly and concerned about the environment and communities, but with subtle implications that reveal a perspective that, in the short, medium and long term, deepens the asymmetries and injustices that currently exist.
[…] Everything seems to indicate that the energy transition proposed by the United Kingdom is a strategy in which the benefits are concentrated on one side of the scale and the losses on the other, replicating the colonial, racist and classist logic that indicates that there are first and second-class people and ways of life.
[…] in order to build a world that is different from the current one, it is prudent to take a clear and unambiguous stance against the war industry. Our territories, our sovereignty and our ecosystems are not available to sustain an economy that brings destruction and death to all regions of the world.”
Read the full analysis by Cristóbal Rodríguez in English or Spanish below | Lee el análisis entero por Cristóbal Rodríguez en inglés o español abajo