A handful of countries control the oil, gas, cobalt and rare earths that underpin entire global industries — and that concentration is fundamentally redrawing the balance of international power.
A country’s influence no longer rests solely on the size of its economy or the strength of its armed forces. Increasingly, it derives from the strategic resources it controls. Those resources define supply chains, shape political decisions and determine the global balance of power — and it is around these assets, rather than borders or military alliances, that much of contemporary geopolitics is now being played out.
At the top of the list remains oil. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), global crude production stands at around 84.5 million barrels per day, with approximately 73% of that total coming from just ten countries. The United States leads with roughly 22.8 million barrels per day, followed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of which exceed ten million barrels per day. The eleven members of OPEC collectively account for about 32% of global output, while the broader OPEC+ grouping — which includes OPEC members and their partners, among them Russia — surpasses 55%.
This concentration explains why decisions taken in Riyadh or Moscow — or regional conflicts such as the recent escalation between the United States and Iran — have a direct and immediate impact on international crude prices, with knock-on effects on inflation and the economies of oil-exporting countries. Angola is a case in point: its fiscal revenues remain heavily exposed to the volatility of those prices.
If oil is spread across a relatively broad set of large producers, other resources are concentrated to an even more extreme degree. Cobalt — essential for electric vehicle batteries and the technology industry — is a prime example. Global cobalt production is dominated almost entirely by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which produced roughly 200,800 tonnes in 2024, far ahead of the second-largest producer, Russia, at just 8,700 tonnes in the same year. A significant share of the DRC’s cobalt mines is owned by Chinese companies — a detail that illustrates how control over a resource extends well beyond geography of extraction to encompass ownership and processing.
It is precisely that second link in the chain — processing, not merely extraction — that explains China’s dominance over rare earth elements, a group of 17 materials critical to technologies ranging from semiconductors and wind turbines to electric motors and precision military equipment. According to analyses from the World Economic Forum and the East Asia Forum, cited by specialist publications, China’s strength does not stem primarily from abundant natural reserves but from decades of deliberate state investment in the refining and chemical processing of these minerals — the most sensitive and hardest-to-replicate stage of the entire production chain.
That control allows Beijing to exert disproportionate influence over entire industrial sectors worldwide, including the aerospace and semiconductor industries of the United States itself, which continues to face serious difficulties in rebuilding autonomous supply chains in these areas.
This vulnerability has pushed the United States and the European Union to adopt active industrial policies in recent months aimed at reducing dependence on concentrated suppliers — a strategy known as friendshoring and nearshoring, which seeks to anchor supply chains in allied or trusted partner countries. In February alone, Washington signed eleven new bilateral framework agreements and memoranda of understanding on critical minerals with countries including Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, the Philippines, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru and Uzbekistan, at a ministerial meeting dedicated to the subject, and also launched the Forum for Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE).
Latin America now sits at the centre of this contest, combining a rare set of strategic assets: large oil reserves, as in Venezuela and Brazil; enormous renewable energy potential; significant deposits of critical minerals used in the energy, digital and defence industries; and abundant water and land — factors that are increasingly valued in the context of the climate crisis and the global scramble for natural resources.
India, meanwhile, holds the world’s fourth-largest rare earth reserves, along with as-yet unexplored deposits of lithium, copper, graphite and zirconium. Those assets led Washington and New Delhi to sign, in February 2025, the TRUST agreement, designed to structure joint supply chains in these strategic sectors. That rapprochement has since cooled, however, after the United States imposed 50% tariffs on Indian goods.
Analysts have taken to calling critical minerals ‘the new oil of the energy transition’ — a phrase that neatly captures the paradigm shift under way. If the twentieth century was defined by geopolitical competition over fossil fuels, the twenty-first appears to be shaped by the race for the minerals that power batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and artificial intelligence itself.
For resource-rich countries that remain dependent on exporting raw materials, the central challenge is moving up the value chain — investing in local processing, technology transfer and the development of a skilled workforce — rather than continuing to export mineral wealth that other economies transform, refine and resell at far higher added value. It is precisely that ambition — converting natural resources into genuine development rather than mere export revenues — that runs through the economic debate in several African economies today, including Angola, whose diversification strategy depends in large part on its ability to move beyond the role of raw-material supplier.
Source: Mercado / Original article: https://mercado.co.ao/poucos-paises-todos-os-recursos/
