Burmese rare earths: China gets the supply, the Burmese get the bill

According to Mediapart, the uncontrolled mining of rare earths in Myanmar, fuelled by civil war and global demand, is wrecking the country's ecosystems and enriching armed actors, with total disregard for local people. Still according to the outlet, the torrential rains that have been falling since late September are helping to spread toxic water. The investigation's headline names China as the main destination for this resource. We do not, at this stage, have further details on volumes, the names of the groups involved or the health toll: better to say so than to invent it.

The structural question remains, and this is where our reading begins. What is described is no accident. Rare earths sit at the heart of the magnets in wind turbines, electric vehicles and smartphones. In other words, the "transition" of some and the digital comfort of others rest on hills dug up somewhere else. Myanmar plays a very classic role here: that of supplier of raw material, whose soil serves as the raw input and whose inhabitants serve as the variable of adjustment.

Dependency economists have been repeating for decades that poor countries are not simply "behind"; their economies were shaped to feed the centre. Here the mechanism is almost a caricature. A solvent external demand, a central authority torn apart by war, and armed actors who take their cut at the source. The value is created elsewhere, in processing and technology; on site remain the basins of contaminated water and the suspect rivers. It is hard not to see in this the old colonial pattern, without a flag but with the same cargoes.

There is also what contemporary Marxists call the metabolic rift: accumulation always demands more materials, and the ecological cost is offloaded onto ecosystems and onto the populations who have contributed least to the problem. The rains spreading toxic water are a brutal illustration of this. The price of the clean magnet is paid in local poison, and it appears on no importer's invoice.

We would be wrong, finally, to reduce the affair to a duel between Beijing and Naypyidaw, or to a simple morality tale about "nasty neighbours". As long as global demand, European demand included, insists on rare earths at the lowest possible cost, someone will have to bear that cost. Supply chains are built so that this someone is invisible and far away. That armed groups profit from it is not an aberration of the system, but one of its consequences, when no authority imposes rules and nobody downstream demands them.

The real question, then, is not only who digs, but who decides, who cashes in and who cleans up. For now, the answer comes down to one inequality: those who decide do not live there, and those who live there decide nothing.