In the global scramble for critical minerals, everyone seems to want a piece of Brazil.
The European Union became the latest power to pitch a minerals deal to Brasília late last month, adding to a flood of interest, both new and old, from countries including the United States, South Korea, Japan, India, Canada, Australia, and China. All of them are eyeing Brazil’s potential rare-earth riches: The country claims the world’s second-biggest rare-earth reserves after China, potential treasures that companies have long tried—and mostly failed—to unlock.
In the global scramble for critical minerals, everyone seems to want a piece of Brazil.
The European Union became the latest power to pitch a minerals deal to Brasília late last month, adding to a flood of interest, both new and old, from countries including the United States, South Korea, Japan, India, Canada, Australia, and China. All of them are eyeing Brazil’s potential rare-earth riches: The country claims the world’s second-biggest rare-earth reserves after China, potential treasures that companies have long tried—and mostly failed—to unlock.
Brazil’s resource wealth has become particularly valuable geopolitical currency in the past year, as critical mineral security is increasingly seen as a trade and military liability, and world powers are jockeying for new deals. But for all of that urgency, Brasília is still figuring out what it wants.
This is Brazil’s “knife-edge moment,” said Monica de Bolle, a Brazilian economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank. “On the one hand, all of these different regions and countries, they want in on the Brazil game,” she said. On the other hand, Brazil “is somewhat unprepared to meet this demand.”
Brazil is home to massive rare-earth reserves—including the coveted heavy rare earths that have been targeted in the U.S.-China trade war—and is rich in a handful of other minerals and metals, including niobium, graphite, and manganese.
But more homework may be necessary. Brazil still hasn’t conducted a proper geological survey to know exactly what it has, especially when it comes to rare earths, de Bolle said. There is coverage for about 30 percent of the country, she added, “but that leaves out a huge portion of the country that really hasn’t been mapped.”
Geography is just one part of the equation. Forging new supply chains requires a whole gamut of separating, refining, and processing capabilities. And like many of the world’s resource-rich countries that are hoping to leverage the critical minerals boom, Brazil’s leaders have ambitions of moving up the value chain rather than remaining an exporter of raw ore.
“We will not repeat the role of mere exporters of raw mineral commodities,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said earlier this year. “We are open to international partnerships that include higher value-added stages and meaningful technology transfer.”
Brazil is also missing necessary regulatory frameworks and doesn’t adequately know what kind of capacity and state participation it wants in the industry, de Bolle said.
Brazil has found itself “with this massive bargaining chip under the ground that it hasn’t yet exploited, and without the institutional framework to back its exploration,” she said.
The country is still wrangling legislation that would regulate the exploration of the country’s minerals. As of April, the Brazilian Congress was weighing as many as 13 bills addressing rare earths and critical minerals, according to Mauro Sousa, the chief of Brazil’s National Mining Agency. At the time, Sousa estimated the release of a national critical mineral policy to come within two to three months.
As of early July, that national policy still has yet to be unveiled, but there has been some movement. In May, the Brazilian lower house approved legislation that would create a basic legal framework for the sector, use tax incentives to encourage domestic processing, and establish a special council that would be empowered to oversee projects, among other provisions. The future of that legislation now hinges on approval in the Senate.
But Brazil’s time frame is “radically different” than its peers that have sought partnerships, said Tom Moerenhout, who leads the Critical Materials Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“Everybody is sprinting, and Brazil is going through a bureaucratic process to decide what the national strategy is and how it will be implemented,” he said.
Brazilian officials have publicly acknowledged the challenges that the country faces in becoming a rare-earths powerhouse. At a conference in June, Sousa said that the country’s regulatory agency does not have sufficient resources to keep up with inspections and its global commitments, Bloomberg reported. “It’s a contradiction at the heart of the Brazilian state,” said Sousa, who nodded to staffing shortages from budget cuts.
With the national government largely absent, foreign companies are coming in and directly dealing with state governments, Moerenhout said. Regulatory uncertainty hasn’t stopped the entry of foreign mining giants that have the support of their respective governments, he added. But other companies that are interested in the Brazilian ecosystem “will hold off a little bit because they might be worried that a national strategy could change things significantly for them,” he said.
Yet it’s not always smooth sailing for those big companies, either. In one of the most high-profile cases, the partially U.S. government-backed firm USA Rare Earth recently announced a $2.8 billion acquisition of Serra Verde, a Brazilian mining company that owns a rare-earths mine and processing plant. But the planned acquisition has come up against some resistance, with a left-wing party in Brazil asking the country’s Supreme Court to halt the sale and the country’s antitrust watchdog opening up a probe into the deal.
USA Rare Earth declined to comment.
With Brazilian elections looming in October, a potential political switch-up has injected the situation with even more uncertainty. The presidential race is shaping up to be a showdown between the incumbent 80-year-old Lula, who is on the ballot for an unprecedented fourth term, and the far-right Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro.
Both candidates tout different visions for the country, with big implications for the mining sector. While Lula has made clear his preference for multilateralism and has resisted the Trump administration’s pressure to sign a minerals deal, the younger Bolsonaro is expected to further align with the United States.
Lula appears to lead in recent polling, although the margins are tight. But prolonged regulatory and political uncertainty—and fears of policy discontinuity—threaten to spook further investment in long-term projects in the sector.
“Unless Brazil gets its act together very fast, it’s going to miss this opportunity,” de Bolle said.
