Restrictions on the export of critical raw materials are surging. Producers may regret it, for they deliver revenue, briefly, but then what?
Mathias Cormann opened the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul in April with a number that did most of the work for him. Highly restrictive measures (export bans and quotas, the heavy artillery of trade policy) had risen from three per cent of all measures applied to critical raw materials in 2017-19 to 36 per cent by 2024. Cormann, the OECD’s secretary-general, called the shift “not marginal but structural”. Standing alongside him at the launch of the 2026 inventory was Ömer Bolat, Türkiye’s trade minister. The two men had reason to look pleased: their host country had just unveiled a rare-earth find of its own.
The OECD’s annual stocktake, covering measures implemented through the end of 2024, recorded a five-fold increase in restrictions since 2009. About 16 per cent of global trade in critical raw materials carried at least one restriction between 2022 and 2024. The headline minerals were the same ones every electric carmaker, wind-turbine builder and chip designer worries about: cobalt and manganese (with 67 per cent and 66 per cent of trade affected), natural graphite (47 per cent) and rare earths (45 per cent). The top three producers control two-thirds of global cobalt, lithium and nickel, and roughly 90 per cent of rare earths. Cormann told the forum that lithium demand from batteries and EVs alone would rise 13-fold to meet climate targets.
In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) issued Announcement No. 18, imposing licensing on seven medium and heavy rare earths (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium). Export volumes collapsed in April and May. Carmakers in America, Europe and Japan cut utilisation rates or shut factories outright as permanent magnets ran short. The IEA recorded European prices reaching six times the levels prevailing inside China. In October 2025, MOFCOM widened controls to five more elements (holmium, erbium, thulium, europium and ytterbium) and added a 50 per cent rule giving Beijing extraterritorial reach over re-exports involving Chinese-origin material.
The OECD report found revenue generation became the fastest-growing stated rationale through the 2010s and the most-cited reason in 2024, accounting for almost half of new measures. Industrial policy ran second. Five countries (India at 19 per cent, China at 17 per cent, Argentina at six per cent, Vietnam at five per cent and Burundi at four per cent) accounted for over half of all new measures introduced between 2009 and 2024. Restrictions on upstream supply, meaning ores and minerals at the bottom of the chain, climbed tenfold over the period.
Jakarta banned exports of nickel ore in January 2020 (an earlier 2014 prohibition had been loosened, then reimposed) and then president Joko Widodo claimed the country’s nickel export value rose from 2.1 billion US dollars to 30 billion US dollars as smelting moved onshore. Indonesia produced around 62 per cent of the world’s mined nickel by 2025. A WTO panel ruled the ban inconsistent with GATT obligations in November 2022; Indonesia appealed in December and the case sits in limbo, the appellate body still hobbled by American vetoes. Kinshasa took its turn in February 2025, banning cobalt exports outright before replacing the ban in October with annual quotas of 96,600 tonnes through 2027. Cobalt prices climbed roughly 160 per cent to about 57,000 US dollars a tonne. Glencore’s first-quarter 2026 cobalt output from its Kamoto and Mutanda operations fell 39 per cent year-on-year.
The boomerang
Ucore Rare Metals broke ground on a heavy rare-earth separation facility in Louisiana after the April 2025 controls, with American federal backing. Energy Fuels in Utah produced its first domestic sample of dysprosium oxide. Noveon Magnetics in Texas expanded manufacturing under multi-year agreements with General Motors and ABB. At the Istanbul forum itself, Türkiye’s energy minister Alparslan Bayraktar declared the Beylikova deposit “one of the world’s largest” of its kind, with a pilot facility already operational and industrial-scale separation in development. The supply Beijing had tried to choke off began appearing elsewhere.
The European Commission’s Critical Raw Materials Act, in force since 2024, sets benchmarks of 10 per cent extraction, 40 per cent processing and 25 per cent recycling within the Union by 2030, with no more than 65 per cent of any strategic mineral to come from a single third country. The OECD is modernising its Export Credit Arrangement to channel finance into diversified mining and recycling. America’s Defence Production Act funds, the EU–Kazakhstan strategic partnership signed in 2022 and Japan’s stockpiling agency JOGMEC are pulling in similar directions. Substitution does the patient work: lithium-iron-phosphate cells, free of cobalt and nickel, accounted for over half of global EV battery installations in 2024.
Producers’ grievances have force. Mineral colonialism left a long bill, ores leaving cheap and finished goods returning dear. Indonesia’s downstream pivot and the DRC’s pricing power have a defensible logic in a system that has, for decades, distributed value-add unfavourably. Bolat in Istanbul made the case for processing at home and partnership abroad. Leila Benali, Morocco’s energy minister, told the forum that more minerals must be extracted in the next 30 years than in all of human history, and called for “global mobilisation” against concentrated processing capacity. Both ministers were arguing for a different deal.
Restrictions deliver revenue, briefly. They build downstream capacity, sometimes. They confer leverage, until customers find another door.
Photo: Dreamstime.