US and SA begin promising neutral dialogues on jointly developing critical minerals

South Africa and the US have begun a promising dialogue on jointly developing South Africa’s critical minerals, many of them important for the US. The initiative could also help to ease the strained relations between Pretoria and Washington.

Senior government officials, business leaders, unionists and others from SA and the US held a closed meeting in Johannesburg this month, hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential Washington-based think-tank.

The US is scouring the world for critical minerals, trying to loosen China’s tight grip on these minerals, which are vital for building many advanced technologies, including in renewable energy, weapons and digital systems.

The idea of the meeting was to seek concrete critical minerals projects that South Africa and the US could develop jointly, according to a mining executive who participated. SA’s rich critical mineral reserves created “an opportunity … and we can use that as a seed to mend the relationship between South Africa and the US.”

But the executive stressed that the aim was to do that indirectly by developing specific concrete projects rather than rushing into any formal government-to-government agreement.

“This is less about political talk shops and bilateral agreements and more about actually trying to do something concrete,” he said. This could be between private companies or between companies and governments.

He said the meeting had discussed, as an example of such concrete collaboration, the Phalaborwa Project. which is owned by Rainbow Rare Earths and is already developing several rare earths with the help of US funding, as the US government-backed investor TechMet is a shareholder in the company.

The executive said the meeting discussed how to find more projects like this one.

The 6 May meeting in Johannesburg built on the momentum of the first such meeting that the CSIS organised, in Washington in March. Ramaphosa implicitly endorsed the initiative when he told the American Chamber of Commerce in Johannesburg on 6 April, “We recently held a critical minerals forum in Washington, with key US government departments and business. We will continue work to develop a critical minerals framework that can ensure that we continue to be a strategic supplier of critical minerals to the US.”

The US ambassador to SA, Brent Bozell, and two South African deputy ministers attended the Johannesburg meeting, according to media reports and other sources. Bozell has made it clear that securing a critical minerals deal is one of his priorities. The US Export-Import Bank (Exim) and the US International Development Finance Corporation, which invest government money in private sector foreign investments, also attended.

There have been other signs of a thaw in relations, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying last month about South Africa: “We remain open to constructive engagement where our interests align.”

Though the critical minerals meetings are dialogues arranged by a think-tank — and are not official bilateral discussions between the two governments — they also provide a neutral forum for government officials and business executives from both sides to meet and talk. There has been little such dialogue between SA and the US under the hostile Trump administration.

Commercial relationship

CSIS critical minerals expert Gracelin Baskaran — who convened the two meetings — wrote in a March report, “Using Minerals and Energy to Rebuild the US-South Africa Relationship”, that the tensions between the US and SA “risk obscuring a commercial relationship that has served US strategic interests for more than 100 years. Policymakers on both sides should avoid allowing diplomatic friction to undermine a minerals supply partnership that Washington would struggle to replace, as the only large-scale alternatives for many of these minerals are Russia and China — both foreign entities of concern.”

The report noted, “South Africa is the United States’ dominant supplier of platinum group metals, chromium, manganese, and military-grade vanadium — minerals that underpin US defence systems, semiconductor manufacturing, automotive production, and any serious reindustrialisation agenda.

“They have no viable allied alternatives: The next largest producers are foreign entities of concern, primarily Russia and China.”

Baskaran told Daily Maverick, “The US and South Africa have been longstanding partners when it comes to mineral security. There is a longstanding two-way partnership whereby South African investment in the United States, in the American mining sector, has been crucial, particularly for PGMs [platinum group metals].

“But also, there's been significant American investment in South African projects over time. Between 2011 and 2013, a lot of the core funding for Eskom and Transnet actually came from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, Exim.

“And so what you have is a mutual, a longstanding mutually beneficial economic partnership when it comes to critical minerals and the mining ecosystem at large.”

Dominant position

The mining executive said the Johannesburg meeting noted that initial collaboration could involve PGMs and South African companies that had dominant positions in those minerals globally.

He added that the discussion also considered how the collaboration could extend beyond just the direct off-take of minerals to include unlocking the critical minerals industry, through the sharing of US technology and US investment into upstream supply chains of mining or downstream beneficiation. The collaboration could help unlock logistics or energy, he said.

As Baskaran’s report noted, “Together, Eskom’s power shortages and Transnet’s logistics constraints have become the two most binding infrastructure risks for South Africa’s mining sector — but they are slowly improving. Energy reliability determines whether mines and smelters can operate, while rail and port capacity determines whether mineral production can reach global markets.”

Her report said SA produced 71% of the global output of platinum and provided 42% of US imports; 81% of the world’s rhodium and 34% of US imports; 22.5% of military-grade vanadium pentoxide and 80% of US imports. The report noted that China produced 55% of this critical mineral, but no US imports. The US imported the remainder of its vanadium pentoxide from Brazil.

The report also noted that SA produced 9% of global vanadium but provided 35% of US imports; 36% of global palladium and 39% of US imports; 37% of global manganese and 23% of US imports; 45% of global chrome and 96% of US imports.

In 2025, South Africa received the sixth-largest amount of rare earth exploration globally — just one spot behind China and well ahead of jurisdictions such as Saudi Arabia and Greenland, indicating strong investor confidence in SA’s long-term potential as a rare earth supplier, the report said.

It also noted South Africa’s exceptional capacity for mineral processing, noting that, unlike many resource-rich countries that export raw materials, “South Africa has decades of experience operating energy-intensive smelters, refineries, and metallurgical facilities, supported by a sophisticated mining ecosystem, engineering expertise, and research institutions such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and Mintek.”

But South Africa was starting to lose ground in minerals processing, largely due to inadequate access to affordable electricity, creating the risk that processing might move to China.

The mining executive agreed. He noted that South Africa still had all its beneficiating (processing) ability for PGMs and some other minerals. But he added that the meeting had noted that this was no longer true of ferrochrome. “We used to be by far the largest producer of ferrochrome. We've lost that position. It’s now China because of our energy shortages, cost of power, etc. We’re no longer competitive.”

Part of the discussion was how a partnership with the US could help to address that problem.

Though SA was undoubtedly dominant in some critical minerals, including PGMs, it would be a “step too far” to say, as some South African politicians sometimes said to the US, “‘You are dependent on us.’ They’re not. If you wanted to source these metals elsewhere in the world, you could,” said the mining executive.

“My take … if I were the US looking at South Africa … would be more on saying, ‘I don’t want these critical metals to be tied up by somebody else.’” That somebody else is China, which, as he noted, already dominates the processing of so many other critical minerals, including lithium.

“China now controls over half of global critical minerals production and an estimated 87% of processing and refining,” according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), a think-tank in the US Department of Defense.

“While China’s critical minerals strategy has emphasised its processing and refining capabilities, Beijing has diversified upstream by acquiring major African mining assets,” said the ACSS.

This dominance often made it challenging for resource-rich African countries “to advance up the value chain”, it added.

It is not yet clear if the CSIS-convened group of SA and US representatives will meet again, but it seems likely they will. DM