It should be noted that there is no shortage of places in, for example North America, with rare earths, but instead all mines were shut down.
Why?
China.
China purposefully sold such way under production cost, then once all competing mines closed, raised prices. And if you're in business, and thinking of going through the cost of reopening, you certainly wouldn't now that your competition has shown it can bankrupt you at a whim.
It's actually not a bad strategy for China to have taken.
Now though, China is restricting on political principles, to hobble chip production for the West. Now, there is a desire for domestic production again.
But if I had a dormant rare earths mine, I wouldn't step up without some protection, such as duties on foreign imports.
Because otherwise, if the duty is just on China, it will still flow cheap through other countries.
There is a french expression « Gouverner c'est prévoir », « To govern is to predict ». If China wants to frequently subsidize west consumption (rare earth, EV cars, batteries, solar panels, microwave ovens in the past, the list is long...), great for us, but our government should have the lucidity to keep some industry under limited economic perfusion (keep the machine tools, fire most of the workers, but keep things running and knowledge) for when the scheme will with certainly came to its end; COVID should have been an eye opener for most.
I researched this a bit earlier this week but didn't save the links. Its not just that China could produce rare earth minerals at lower costs but western countries starting tightening their laws on mining (due to uranium byproducts) but also environments laws. Then they willingly shared the production techniques to China to do all the dirty work.
However US restarted its rare earth mining a few years back and now it ranks second in production through far behind China. I'm guess the main concern was the need of these rare earth minerals for military equipment.
Don't blame every woe you ever saw on China as its modern these days in US, this is solely US government incompetence par excellence. I am pretty sure there must have been a competent bureaucrat yelling this left and right 2 decades ago but completely ignored or worse.
They could foresee it from lightyears ahead and compensate miners due to strategic resource and it would cost US literally nothing, you know in same vein as GM or Boeing were/are 'strategic' shitshows.
But they did nothing and let simple market force decide outcome. China didn't close US mines, US mine owners due to economical pressures and lack of support form US did.
Why?
China.
China purposefully sold such way under production cost, then once all competing mines closed, raised prices. And if you're in business, and thinking of going through the cost of reopening, you certainly wouldn't now that your competition has shown it can bankrupt you at a whim.
It's actually not a bad strategy for China to have taken.
Now though, China is restricting on political principles, to hobble chip production for the West. Now, there is a desire for domestic production again.
But if I had a dormant rare earths mine, I wouldn't step up without some protection, such as duties on foreign imports.
Because otherwise, if the duty is just on China, it will still flow cheap through other countries.