What happened.
In an insightful Foreign Policy report, columnist Lynne O'Donnell revealed that China’s efforts to access Afghanistan's massive trove of lithium, may be more about monopolizing rights to the resource than extracting it.
That might sound strange considering Beijing’s latest negotiations with the Taliban have yielded a “maybe, could-be deal worth billions.” But, as O’Donnell tells it, while “Afghanistan is ostensibly an El Dorado, with mineral riches worth at least $1 trillion,” owning a resource is not the same as exploiting it profitably.
For starters, Afghanistan’s lithium is “sketchily surveyed,” and the primary surveys were done by the Soviets during their invasion in ‘80s and, then, again by the Americans twenty years ago.
O’Donnell, Foreign Policy:
And then there’s the security issue, a problem that has plagued Afghanistan for the last few decades, or centuries, and which spooked the Chinese away from their big copper project. Even if mining could go on without bloodshed, who would sign the contracts? Few recognize the Taliban government, and a chunk of the cabinet is under international sanctions for terrorism. The legal and regulatory uncertainty almost renders the rest moot.
To explain why Beijing would go through the trouble of dealing with the Taliban to access lithium deposits that may not produce, one Afghanistan mining expert simply said: “The Chinese, at best, will get the contract and sit on it to keep control of the supply and prices of lithium.”
Why it matters.
Gonna hurt more than our pocketbooks
Know what’s worse than shelling out what you could spend to get a near-religious experience at the local award-winnning sushi spot for a smartphone battery? Not being able to buy (or afford) a lithium-ion battery at all because a hostile power cut-off exports to your country’s market.
And what might happen if the same occurred just when you decide to trade that gas-guzzler in for a shiny, new, tax-crediting electric vehicle? At some point, you’ll need another laptop, too.
And that brings the importance of what China might do with its monopoly of the world’s lithium-battery supply chain so much closer to home.
Unfortunately, O’Donnell believes China’s interests in Afghanistan’s lithium “are purely political.”
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