The EU’s Global Gateway and Critical Raw Materials: A Latin American Perspective

1. Start from a common goal and actual understanding

Both the EU and Latin America share a foundational objective: achieving sustainable development. This, in its more basic formulation, is development that serves current generations without compromising future ones. In resource-rich Latin American countries, this translates into one concrete ambition: leveraging the natural resource endowment to generate lasting prosperity.

This common goal matters because it helps reframe GG partnerships going forward. Projects should not be primarily about securing European supply chains, nor about increasing Latin American export revenues; they should rather focus on building durable development together. 
Mutually beneficial GG projects will also emerge from genuine dialogue, rather than a top-down approach or by assuming benefits without first effectively mapping each country’s (and often each sub-national region’s) specific challenges and opportunities. Mining impacts and potential benefits are usually felt more strongly at a local scale, and GG project design should reflect that reality.
Finally, given the sustainability component, any GG project in the critical raw materials space should be designed with two distinct “moments” in mind (echoing the intertemporal nature of sustainable development): (I) the mining phase, and (II) what comes after it.

2. The mining phase: getting the conditions right
For the mining phase, four conditions define the space for mutually beneficial GG engagement, and point to areas where the EU has the most to offer:
(i)    Mining has to happen, and happen at scale
This calls for financial support (including de-risking mechanisms), scientific collaboration (especially in exploration and metallurgy) and enabling infrastructure (i.e., infrastructure that brings to market hitherto uneconomic mining potential). 

On infrastructure, an additional important –and geopolitically relevant– point can be made: once built, infrastructure shapes economic outcomes for decades. Thus, infrastructure designed to help a mine or a mining region should be designed, from an EU perspective, with a view of connecting critical raw materials to Atlantic markets.
(ii)    Mining has to be socially beneficial
Strong institutional frameworks and shared standards rooted in transparency, rule of law, and human rights represent a genuine common interest of both the EU and Latin American countries. GG projects that help build and strengthen these frameworks deliver value on both sides of the partnership.
Successful mining jurisdictions around the world include those where communities enjoy the benefits of mining. It is therefore a requirement of long-term viability of the mining sector that it be perceived as delivering actual benefits to affected parties. Ensuring the existence of a socially beneficial mining sector is both the right thing to do, and a feature of the sector’s very viability.
(iii)    Environmental responsibility as a third dimension
Technical and scientific support for baseline studies, circular economy design from the ground up, and traceability tools are areas where Latin American countries could benefit the most from EU expertise. Also, in these and other environmentally responsible mining matters, the EU’s own market requirements create a direct incentive for alignment. 

And not all initiatives in this area demand the allocation of significant resources. Certain small-scale interventions may have outsized impacts: by, for example, assisting Latin American jurisdictions with the means to effectively control mining projects and operations (including inexpensive field equipment, or even the provision of a 4x4 truck), a GG project would efficiently deliver immediate and mutually beneficial results, while not necessarily tying up significant capital outlays.
(iv)    Finally, mining must make economic sense over the long term
The EU’s demand for critical raw materials is structural, not cyclical, and underpins the development of long-term, multi-decade mining projects. Long-term offtake relationships, combined with the prospect of a fully operational and increasingly significant EU-Mercosur agreement integration, provide an economic foundation that is at the root of mining sector viability.

3. Beyond mining: the long game
Latin American countries are not just looking to become permanent mineral exporters. As mentioned before, they are also striving to convert a finite natural endowment into lasting prosperity. Thus, successful and mutually beneficial GG projects must be designed from the outset bearing in mind what happens when the ore is gone.
There are many levers to address this, including:
(i) Dual-purpose infrastructure: roads, energy connections, and digital networks built to serve a mine can –and should– serve broader economic development if designed with that ambition from the start.

(ii) The second, and often mentioned, is value addition. This, in turn, can be looked at from two different perspectives:

a. Downstream processing and refining. This, although certainly valuable, is oftentimes the more complex path, requiring a convergence of factors. EU collaboration in technology, financing, and market access can help downstream value addition take shape, and would also offer win-win opportunities. A good example would be the construction of smelting capacity in Latin America. This would not just provide jobs and local value addition capabilities, but also help attenuate the high concentration of mineral processing in other jurisdictions (notably, China). In this sense, Atlantic facing smelting facilities could also have beneficial geopolitical implications for the EU. 
b. Less discussed but equally important is the upstream opportunity: helping Latin American countries build a strong, export-oriented mining equipment and related services sector. This creates industrial capacity that outlasts any individual deposit. 
The EU might not be known for being the seat of many global mining giants, but is a powerhouse in related equipment, technology and service providers. European suppliers (including Sandvik, Epiroc, Metso Outotec and Atlas Copco) are global leaders in drilling, processing and beneficiation equipment. This industrial base would be a natural entry point for equipment and technology partnerships that build lasting industrial capacity in Latin American mining economies.
(iii) The third lever is economic diversification. Identifying sectors and activities that are complementary to a mining economy, and building the academic, scientific, and R&D infrastructure to support them, is a long-term investment. European universities, research institutions, and technology transfer mechanisms are all tools that GG projects should look to incorporate.
(iv) The fourth, broader still, is economic integration beyond minerals: fintech, agribusiness, advanced manufacturing are all sectors that would benefit from deeper EU-Latin American ties regardless of the critical mineral space. The EU-Mercosur agreement, recently concluded, if brought fully into force, would provide the overarching framework.

The EU should work actively with Latin American partners to identify and name these opportunities. Making “beyond mining” a visible, funded, and tracked dimension of GG projects would be a meaningful signal that Europe sees this as a long-term partnership between equals, not a transactional supply arrangement.

4. Is the EU’s offer competitive?
This is of course a very topical question considering the current geopolitical landscape.
Europe does bring some significant advantages to the table, including:

• The EU’s collective nature, which provides it with a breadth of expertise, depth of (cultural and historical) networks across the Global South, and diversity of instruments and approaches give it a richer toolkit than any single-country competitor can offer
• Its institutional gravitas is also a stabilizing asset: EU commitments carry structural durability that administration-dependent alternatives cannot match, and this is of relevance for mining projects with multi-decade horizons
• Finally, the EU is the largest sophisticated market for the minerals Latin America produces. That alignment of interests is intrinsic to the relationship in a way that has no direct equivalent elsewhere

But this is also a race. Speed matters, and the EU’s institutional architecture, including its consensus requirements, procurement procedures and multi-layered approval processes, can be a genuine bottleneck. 
The EU does not need to outcompete China on pace or the US on market weight. But it does need to compete on what it uniquely offers: long-term stability, high standards, genuine partnership, and scale of market. That offer is real and distinctive; making it legible, deliverable and fast enough to matter is the work ahead.