Three years after China's export controls made the vulnerability of critical minerals supply chains more concrete, allied governments have committed extraordinary sums to building alternative supply chains. While public finance in advanced economies has quadrupled since 2023, refining capacity has become more, not less, concentrated, and investment remains similarly clustered upstream in mining rather than in processing capacity, where the chokepoint actually sits.
With this context in mind, this Expert Roundtable, jointly organized by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the University of Ottawa through their Canada-Indo-Pacific Critical Minerals Hub initiative, seeks to explore two questions: whether the current toolkit for building alternative supply chains is the right one, and where there might be greater scope for closer Canada-Indo-Pacific co-operation on supply chain resilience.
