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07-06-2025
PARIS/ CANBERRA: Australia offers a secure alternative supply for critical minerals vital to industry, its trade minister Don Farrell said on Thursday, in the face of rising concerns about Beijing’s dominance of the sector.
China’s decision in April to suspend exports of a wide range of rare earths and related magnets crucial to sectors ranging from automakers to aerospace and defence was widely seen as Beijing using that dominance for leverage in its trade war with the Trump administration.
While China is a top global producer of 30 of the 50 minerals considered critical by the US Geological Survey, Australia has some of the largest critical minerals deposits.
“We think we can be a safe and reliable supplier into the supply chain for critical minerals around the world,” Farrell told media in an interview but Australia does not want to just “dig and ship” the minerals and aims to process them as well, although that would require capital from outside such as the European Union, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India, he said.
The EU and Australia signed a partnership agreement, opens new tab last year to develop critical materials along the supply chain ranging from extraction to refining and processing leftover waste.
Farrell said critical minerals could end up in a free trade agreement with the EU that Australia and the bloc are trying to revive after talks broke down in 2023, mainly over agriculture.
Australia has sent top trade officials to Brussels this week to nail down the next steps forward as both sides seek access to alternative markets as the Trump administration aggressively builds tariff barriers to its trade partners.
“I think there is now impetus on both sides to look at another crack at the agreement,” Farrell said in Paris, where he met EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic on the sidelines of a meeting at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Farrell also met US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer at the OECD and told him Australia wanted the Trump administration to remove its 10% baseline tariffs and 50% tariffs on aluminium and steel. The United States, which has had a free trade agreement with Australia for two decades, ran a $17.9 billion trade surplus with the country last year, according to Greer’s office.
Meanwhile, Australia and the European Union have revived talks for a sweeping free trade agreement, after Australia’s trade minister Don Farrell met with the European Commissioner for Trade Maros Sefcovic in Paris on Wednesday.
The meeting on the sidelines of the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting comes amid a Wednesday deadline by the United States for countries to send their best offer in trade negotiations.
Farrell met the US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Paris on Tuesday, after Australia criticized US President Donald Trump’s move to double steel tariffs to 50% from 25% and called for the removal of a 10% tariff on all its exports.
“Both Australia and the EU recognize that now is the time to strengthen our economic partnership, and we’re working through the remaining issues to try and finalize the deal,” Farrell told Reuters in a statement.
A pact with the region was “about building economic resilience in a rapidly changing global environment,” said Farrell.
For his part, Sefcovic told journalists in Paris “we believe we can achieve substantial progress this year” in the free-trade talks, which have been on ice since 2023. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
