If Brussels could get its way, all publicly procured goods would be low-carbon and made in Europe. This is the ambition behind the recent Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA). But ‘Made in Europe’ is unlikely to succeed as Europe neither extracts nor refines the minerals that its industries depend on at anything close to the scale required. Africa, which holds vast mineral reserves but lacks refining capacity, offers the most realistic way out.
But for this to work, the EU must move beyond partnership declarations and tie its investment in African processing capacity to long-term offtake agreements that would actually make that capacity viable. The EU cannot risk letting ‘Made in Europe’ become a narrow industrial sovereignty tool that will fail quietly. Rather, it requires an honest model of interdependence.
Great Expectations and Greater Disappointments
The EU faces two problems in securing the minerals needed for its green, digital and defence industrial strategies. The first is access to raw materials. European countries extract little themselves and the EU’s sustainable financing taxonomy limits most mining activities. This creates a significant gap between the political urgency around mineral security and what European public and private finance is able to support.
The second difficulty is processing. Even if Europe secured reliable access to raw materials, it lacks the capacity to refine them into industrial-grade inputs at scale. This makes European industry highly dependent on processed materials from abroad, mainly from China which controls 60–80% of global processing capacity across key minerals, putting Europeans at risk of Chinese coercion.
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