The Democratic Republic of Congo produces 74 percent of the world's cobalt but refines almost none of it. That bottleneck, a mineral-rich nation trapped in commodity extraction while the profitable processing happens elsewhere, is not an accident. It is the structural outcome of a deliberate reshaping of global trade rules that the United Nations documented for the first time in June 2026. UNCTAD's *Global Trade Update* identified nearly 100 new export measures on critical minerals introduced since 2020, paired with 73 international partnership agreements that carve the supply chain into competing bilateral fiefdoms. The report does not frame this as crisis. It calls it fragmentation. But fragmentation is the polite word for a system that is working precisely as the major powers designed it.
Since 2022, 58 of those 73 agreements were signed, and many of them span the full value chain from mining to refining to manufacturing, though upstream and extraction activities still dominate, especially in deals involving developing countries. This coverage sounds comprehensive. It is not. These deals concentrate processing capacity in the hands of China and the United States' treaty partners while mineral-rich developing nations remain locked into the low-value extraction stage. China produces 78 percent of the world's natural graphite and dominates refining of cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earths. Australia, Chile, and China together account for more than 70 percent of global lithium production. The agreements that UNCTAD mapped do not change that balance; they codify it. A bilateral deal between the United States and Indonesia on nickel processing is not the same as Indonesia owning the refinery. The machinery stays foreign-owned, the profits stay foreign-directed, and Indonesia remains a quarry.
The export measures paint the real picture. Licensing requirements, export taxes, and outright bans comprising nearly 100 separate critical minerals measures since 2020—specifically 37 licensing requirements, 31 export taxes, 29 export bans, and 1 export quota—that is roughly one new restriction every two weeks. The DRC implemented cobalt export quotas. Indonesia introduced new mining rules designed to favor state-owned enterprises and foreign partners aligned with Jakarta's geopolitical positioning. China maintained its grip on rare earth exports through licensing. None of these happened in isolation. Each one was a response to the others, creating a cascade of bilateral arrangements that UNCTAD now warns risk creating a fragmented system of overlapping agreements and incompatible standards. That fragmentation is not free. It raises compliance costs for everyone who tries to source from multiple regions. It creates artificial scarcity in the supply chain even when physical supply exists. It forces developing nations to choose between Western partnerships and Chinese partnerships, knowing that choosing wrong means market access disappears.
UNCTAD made this explicit in its formal recommendation: mineral-rich developing countries need to strengthen local processing and value addition, with technology transfer and skills development, to avoid remaining locked into low-value roles. That is not a prediction. It is a diagnosis of what is already happening. The gap between mine output and refining capacity in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia has widened as Western and Chinese firms built processing infrastructure in allied countries. A mine in the DRC feeds a refinery in South Africa or China. A lithium deposit in Chile feeds a battery plant in South Korea or Nevada. The supply chains are physically arranged to keep value creation away from the resource-rich nations that have the least bargaining power.
What to watch: First, whether the DRC's cobalt export quota, tightening further as its June 30 deadline approaches, will force Western battery makers to accept higher refining costs or shift to other supply sources, effectively testing whether export controls actually stick or whether price pressure breaks them. Second, adoption rates of competing standards from the competing trade blocs. The UNCTAD report lists 73 agreements, but it did not count how many are actively governing trade versus how many are ceremonial partnerships. If supply actually routes through multiple incompatible standards, compliance costs will spike enough to force consolidation. Third, whether any mineral-rich nation successfully negotiates processing technology transfer into the next wave of bilateral deals. UNCTAD flagged this as the missing piece. If it stays missing, the fragmentation UNCTAD documented becomes permanent structure, not temporary friction.