cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/55695480
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Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry operates in secret, with no public records of active permits or companies involved. Worksites are heavily guarded, and only a handful of journalists have reported on the ground over the past decade.
Still, news has trickled out — of poisoned rivers, forests devoid of wildlife, and farmland so toxic that growers cannot sell their crops. In May, a local human rights group reported that a Chinese rare earth mining company in Myanmar’s eastern Shan State was using prisoners and human trafficking victims for “slave labor.” It found that both the Myanmar military and United Wa State Army, an ethnic army that maintains a ceasefire with the military, were complicit.
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The businesses carrying out this extraction face few consequences in Myanmar — in part because the industry operates in a legal grey area. Chinese companies extract rare earths in autonomous, militarized regions controlled by local ethnic armies, which protect mining operations while taking a cut of the profits. The mined material is then trucked across the border into China, where it is mixed and essentially laundered with rare earths from other sources and processed for use in global products.
The conflict monitoring organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED, has ranked Myanmar’s war as the second-most extreme on the planet, and also the world’s most fragmented, with more than 1,200 distinct armed groups. Corruption and weak rule of law have further contributed to an explosion of criminal activity of all kinds. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Myanmar has the highest levels of organized crime of any country in the world.
“External influence, such as global demand and China, play a major role in Myanmar’s rare earth extraction,” said Thaw Htoo, a pseudonym for a political ecologist from Myanmar who conducts her research anonymously for safety reasons.
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As the [U.S. and China] seek control over rare earth supply chains as a means to advance their national interests, from weapons to renewable energy, their demand is indirectly funding conflict actors in Myanmar during a time of war, incentivizing rapid extraction with minimal safeguards.
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A recent report by Forest Trends, a conservation-focused nonprofit, found that nature crimes — the illegal extraction and trade of natural resources — are “deeply embedded within broader illicit economies” across Southeast Asia’s Mekong Region, and that global demand for rare earths may intensify not only extraction in Myanmar, but associated conflict and crime.
Although legality in Myanmar is complicated by the military’s illegitimate claim to power and its involvement in criminal enterprises, Myanmar’s role as a hub for environmental exploitation is undisputed. According to Forest Trends, this activity provides military and criminal groups with revenue outside formal banking systems that can fund other illicit operations.
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"Everyone’s talking about rare earths now, and understandably so. But the story didn’t start there, and it won’t end there either,” said Sarma of the University of Zurich. “People are finally paying attention to the slow, perpetual violence that’s been unfolding here for decades beneath layers of extraction.”
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China once mined most of the world’s supply of rare earths domestically. In the Bayan Obo district of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of northern China, open-pit mining in the 1990s and early 2000s scarred the landscape with massive tailings ponds and poisoned the air and water.
Bayan Obo is mainly a source of light and medium rare earths. Heavy rare earths are scarcer and more difficult to extract, and are typically mined in Myanmar through a process called in-situ leaching. It involves dispersing acid and chemical solvents through mountains, leaching out the rare earths in chemical pools, and burning them in furnaces.
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The method carries substantial environmental and public health risks, according to Regan Kwan, a research analyst at the Stimson Center who studies the impacts of rare earth mining in Southeast Asia — particularly when pollution makes its way into water. “Chemical leaks and wastewater discharge can turn rivers toxic, reduce biodiversity, and expose communities to elevated levels of rare earth elements and heavy metals in crops,” he said. “On a human level, chronic exposure can affect the brain, liver, bones, and immune systems, and can be extremely detrimental during childhood development.”
China initially endured the consequences of in-situ leaching in its southeastern provinces, but eventually, the harms reached a tipping point. In 2012, the government found that rare earth mining had caused “great damage” to public safety, health, and the environment, and vowed to overhaul the industry. It has since drastically tightened regulations, driving the shift into Myanmar.
“Regulations were looser,” said Ryan Castilloux, the founder and managing director of the critical minerals strategy firm Adamas Intelligence. “Chinese companies or interests could take their expertise and get production going quickly.”
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To keep business flowing amid the volatility in Kachin [in Myanmar], Chinese companies expanded rare earth mining southward into Myanmar’s Shan State — particularly areas bordering China, controlled by ethnic armies that signed ceasefires with the military.
“China’s rising demand, coupled with uncertainty in Kachin, has shifted investment,” said Xu Peng, a political scientist at the University of Manchester. “With high margins and reliable tax take, rare earths have become a key, competing extractive resource for ethnic armed organizations, reinforcing today’s rapid growth.”
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Workers in Myanmar also described severe environmental destruction. “The water is lifeless, and the mountains have been badly damaged,” said Kaung. “Plants and trees can no longer grow. … Wild animals have lost their habitats due to extensive drilling and the digging of boreholes.”
According to Mi Mi, companies abandon mining sites after depleting their resources. “No one takes responsibility for what happens to the land,” she said. “Despite this, we have no choice but to rely on this work for our livelihoods.”
Nyi Tun, a man in his 50s who has also been given a pseudonym, described major impacts in his village. His family has survived generationally through hill cultivation and raising livestock, but this way of life is now under threat. “In the past, this area was very pleasant to live in,” he said. “It is not good to live in anymore. There is a lot of mining across the mountains, including rare earth mining.”
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In the dry season, trucks transporting rare earths to China blow up dust and damage the roads. The hot season feels hotter than in the past, while the rainy season brings deadly landslides and floods. “Crop yields are lower now,” said Nyi Tun. “We can only farm enough for our own consumption; the yield isn’t good enough to produce a surplus to sell.”
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Once these rare earths cross into China, processing is highly centralized. Castilloux of Adamas Intelligence compared China’s rare earth processing industry to a coffee grinder, so thoroughly blending together material from different sources that the individual components are nearly impossible to trace to their origin countries. “Unless you’re on the floor and you can kind of track the molecules down the separation line and then follow it to a metals plant, it becomes really, really tricky,” he said.
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While accountability remains near-absent in Myanmar, the problems continue, and are spreading to other countries. In neighboring Thailand, water testing over the past year has revealed toxic contamination of rivers from rare earth extraction and other forms of mining in Myanmar. Local advocates in Thailand are calling on the Thai government to take action, even though it does not formally engage with the ethnic armies controlling areas of Shan State where the rivers originate, and where civic space is minimal.
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Workers face pressure to keep their heads down. “If information related to rare earth mining is posted online, monitoring becomes stricter and more vigilant,” said Min.
After his brother’s death, his employers urged him to refrain from posting about the incident on social media, while offering him compensation amounting to around a year’s worth of wages. Ultimately, he accepted the offer, sent the money home to his family, and continued his work. “There is no freedom to speak openly about rare earth mining,” he said. “Workers simply work, rest when their shifts end, and receive their salaries when the time comes.”
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