What’s on : Lectures

Geopolitics: strategic non-fuel minerals and the China-Africa connection

Lectures
Date
28 Apr 2015
Start time
7:30 PM
Venue
Tempest Anderson Hall
Speaker
Prof. Ewan Anderson
Geopolitics: strategic non-fuel minerals and the China-Africa connection

Event Information

Geopolitics: strategic non-fuel minerals and the China-Africa connection

Ewan Anderson, Professor Emeritus in Geopolitics, University of Durham

Geopolitics results from the collaboration between geography and political science, the material and the ideational, the scientific and the perceptual. A key geopolitical concern is strategic resources such as petroleum and water. Less high profile but no less important are strategic minerals without which many major industries, particularly in the defence field, would fail to function. In the post-war period, warning signs of potential supply problems first appeared in 1979. These intensified in the 1980s when Professor Anderson was the Advisor to President Reagan’s Strategic Minerals Task Force. Subsequent surveys have shown that the problem remains but the minerals involved have diversified and the critical sources of supply have changed. South Africa has been displaced by China.

Member’s report

This subject includes the question of strategic resources: natural, including water, oil, gas and minerals; and then food. In the case of water for example, rivers, which often cross national boundaries, potentially enable one country either to deprive another of water or to flood it.

Professor Anderson looked at minerals for this talk explaining that in the late seventies the big issue was obtaining cobalt for steel in weapons. More recently minerals used in high technology equipment have become equally if not more important. South Africa and Zaire were the main sources in the earlier period. South Africa is still important but China, with vast reserves of a wide variety of minerals, has a stranglehold on the market. Conscious of its vulnerability, the West is adopting counter measures such as stock-piling, substitution, recycling and conservation of resources. Other sources are ‘difficult’, but with climate change, Greenland is emerging as a promising alternative.

Risk is a major consideration, including that associated with movement of minerals. Some types are needed and available in only very small quantities and can be transported by air. Others are bulky and heavy and can only be moved by sea, involving of course much greater potential hazards.

We were given many insights including a fascinating example of how supplies continued despite unrest. During the Cold War, for example, the Soviet Union continued to supply the US with palladium, which, ironically, is used in missile development. In another example of pragmatism, the US continued to trade in critical chemicals with South Africa, despite an embargo over apartheid.

Ken Hutson