“Water is a huge problem, as you all know, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Tajikistan has one of the greatest water potentials in the world. . . we have got a water resources task force now set up in the Department to examine how we can additionally help the countries of the area, and particularly Pakistan with the water issue.”
Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Briefing on his Recent Trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Georgia and Germany, March 2, 2010.
Last week Stratfor issued a cool piece, “Niger: The Coup and Uranium.” This is straight up natural security reading for you, dear readers. You can get the full article in exchange for your email address, which I’d suggest is worth the price for the map and chart they provide. A few brief highlights:
Niger contains one of the largest deposits of uranium in the world and was the world’s sixth-largest producer in 2008...France maintained a monopoly on Niger’s uranium production for more than three decades following the beginning of commercial production in 1971. But Niamey has begun to open its doors to other countries — most notably China, which has been increasingly active on the African continent in recent years.
...While uranium does not form as high of a percentage of Niger’s gross domestic product as might be expected (roughly 7 percent in 2008), the junta nonetheless has a financial incentive to keep these operations running smoothly. Uranium constitutes roughly half of Niger’s exports and the lion’s share of foreign direct investment — meaning that whoever controls the purse strings of the government has access to big money.
A tip of the hat to our Senior Military Fellow from the Marine Corps for this one!
The full CNAS team attended our awesome colleague Abe Denmark’s event yesterday at the Newseum that focused on his just-released edited volume, Contested Commons. The event featured Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, USN; Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S.
Yesterday I took a virtual trip to check out the U.S. Institute of Peace event, Natural Resources: Plunder or Peace, via live webcast. The event featured Paul Collier, director of the Centre of African Economies at Oxford University, and Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, and focused primarily on natural resources beneath the ground (or subsoil assets, as they were commonly referred to during the event).
Paul Collier began his discussion with fun question to the audience. According to Collier, an average square kilometer of land in the richest countries in the world was valued to have $120,000 worth of subsoil assets. The statistics game started when he asked the audience whether they thought that the value of subsoil assets beneath an average square kilometer of African land would be more than that average. By a show of hands (save my own, as webcasts are only projected one-way), it seemed most everyone indicated a vote of “yes.” But according to Collier, everyone was wrong; the average in Africa amounts to roughly $23,000. By his assessment, this pointed to one obvious conclusion: we simply haven’t discovered the other assets to make up for the nearly $100,000 disparity. I temporarily accepted this fact and listened on.
It has been a long week already, after a marathon reception Tuesday evening and a full day yesterday, as we had the honor of supporting the Defense Attachés Association (DAA) in their annual conference, “Strategic Resources and New Global Security Trends.” We are a bit tired and out covering some events and hearings today, so for today’s post we are providing a few take-aways from the DAA event. It was held under Chatham House rules, so these will be general and not attributed, but hopefully still a bit insightful:
Here in the blog, we get deep into the details a lot, and it was great to have the opportunity to pull back up to the big picture level and make the case as to why natural resources are inseparable from security, and the linkages that are important to understanding the issues we cover here. A few of the speakers may allow us to post transcripts, and we will certainly let you know if we do!
Foreign policy watchers know that India is a hot topic in world politics, and will only become more so as its population and economic prospects increase (though its economy, like most others in the world, will take some time to recover after the global downturn). India is of interest to us natural security-minded people as well: it relies on imports for most of its increasing energy needs; it is a somewhat serious contributor to climate change with its growing use of coal to generate electricity and often a climate negotiations trend setter for developing nations; and its perennial water issues point to some worrying trends for the future. As we are just beginning to think more about these issues for India (and what it means for U.S. security), we won’t be drawing any hard conclusions until we’ve done a bit more research and exploration. But with this in mind, I searched for some historic lit that might provide some interesting insights.
I found such an article way back in the October 1943 issue of Foreign Affairs: “India's Mineral Wealth and Political Future,” by Charles H. Behre, Jr., a lifelong geologist and partner in the mineral consulting firm Behre, Dolbear, and Company. The entire premise of the article is admittedly dated—it’s about how to partition India into a majority Hindu nation and a majority Muslim nation, which wouldn’t happen for another four years—but it gives insight into important minerals considerations, and provides a good comparison case for the current resource wealth of India and Pakistan. Here are a few highlights:
Today we’re starting a semi-regular series called “Top 5.” You may be asking “Top 5 what?” We will be periodically examining some general background of the larger issues we analyze by looking at major characteristics of the things of which we speak. That might sound vague, but that’s because it is intended to be a flexible device. For example, we may take snapshots of the top 5 oil producers, top 5 reserve holders of certain minerals, top 5 provinces currently negotiating water treaties involving hydroelectric damming of Himalayan water sources, or anything else we think might be helpful to you and for our own research. And we of course welcome suggestions for top 5-style explorations that would provide useful background to any natural security topics.
With all this in mind, today I am examining the top 5 countries that export rare earth elements (REEs) to the United States. These elements—used in products ranging from catalytic converters (pdf) and mp3 players to precision-guided munitions (pdf)—are commonly grouped together because of their chemical similarities, but the name is confusing because they’re not particularly rare. I am choosing to use the term “rare earth elements” instead of “rare earth metals” or “rare earth minerals” because it is the preferred term of the National Academy of Sciences, which issued an excellent report in 2008 entitled Managing Materials for a Twenty-first Century Military. This report notes two different series of elements are often included under the banner of REEs: the lanthanide series (atomic numbers 57 to 71) and the actinide series (atomic numbers 89 to 103), along with individual elements scandium and yttrium. But not all sources (pdf) include the actinide series when talking about REEs. We will keep our focus away from the actinide series for the sake of this post, since the actinides include the radioactive elements, and radioactivity raises special complications.
My colleague Mike pointed me in the direction of this post by Stephen Walt, which considers strategic minerals on a Halloween list of “overblown threats, dubious nightmares, and (mostly) fictitious demons.” There he links to an article that was billed as offering alternative options for dealing with a mineral supply disruption: a 1982 Foreign Policy article by Michael Shafer, the Director of the Center for Global Security and Democracy at Rutgers University. Shafer published this piece, called “Mineral Myths,” (subscription required) to offer an alternative look to the narrative of mineral dependencies and resource wars.
Shafer does not suggest that the implementation of various precautions warrants the blasé rejection of all supply concerns, as Walt seems to portray. While Shafer did reject the notion that the United States would face a true strategic, military problem due to mineral dependencies, he did so in the framework of the Cold War. Shafer went out of his way to explain that while we may face shortfalls, they would not cause second- and third-order effects such as direct confrontation with the Soviet Union or a break with allies who must turn to the USSR for irreplaceable minerals.
