A new UNCTAD report published June 12, 2026 and discussions at the Geneva Dry commodities shipping conference in April confirm that surging demand for lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earths is carving out entirely new maritime trade corridors. But industry executives from South32 and Anglo American are pointing to the same uncomfortable truth that haunts every supply-chain map: redirecting ore shipments does not solve the problem when China still controls the refineries that turn raw material into usable product.
Introduction
Here is the simplest version of a complicated story. The world needs vastly more critical minerals to build electric vehicles, battery storage systems, data centres, and renewable energy infrastructure. Getting those minerals from mine to factory involves ships. And those shipping routes are now being redrawn, sometimes by design and sometimes by disruption, in ways that have real consequences for governments, industries, and the people who depend on them.
On June 12, 2026, UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its Global Trade Update under the title "The Shifting Dynamics of Critical Minerals Trade." The report arrived just weeks after the Geneva Dry conference, the world's leading commodities shipping gathering, had devoted significant floor time to the same topic. Together, the two events offer the clearest picture yet of how the critical minerals race is reshaping the physical movement of goods across oceans.
The picture is not entirely reassuring. New trade corridors are emerging, and shipping demand in several bulk segments is growing strongly. But the underlying processing bottleneck, the fact that China controls the refining capacity that turns ore into usable industrial inputs, remains almost entirely intact. Changing the route of a ship does not change who runs the smelter at the other end.
What the UNCTAD Report Actually Says
UNCTAD's June 2026 update covers the full sweep of critical minerals trade, from demand projections through supply concentration to the policy responses now multiplying across governments. The headline numbers are striking. Lithium demand is projected to rise by 353 percent between 2024 and 2040. Graphite demand is expected to increase by 131 percent over the same period. These are not marginal adjustments to existing commodity markets. They represent a structural transformation in what the global economy needs to move by sea.
The minerals driving this shift include lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earth elements. All of them are essential to clean energy technologies, electric mobility, digitalization, and industrial electrification. The report notes that clean technologies are expected to account for a growing share of total demand, meaning the trajectory is self-reinforcing: the faster the energy transition proceeds, the more minerals it requires.
The supply picture is highly concentrated. In 2025, the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounted for 74 percent of global cobalt mine production. China produced 78 percent of the world's natural graphite. Australia, Chile, and China together produced more than 70 percent of global lithium. These figures matter for shipping because concentrated supply means concentrated trade flows, and concentrated trade flows create both efficiency and fragility at the same time.
The report also catalogues the policy response. Since 2020, nearly 100 export-related measures have been introduced on critical minerals globally, including 37 licensing requirements, 31 export taxes, and 29 export bans. The DRC has introduced the highest number of such measures, followed by China and Indonesia. UNCTAD warns that this proliferation of controls, combined with a rapid expansion in bilateral mineral partnership agreements (73 identified, with 58 signed after 2022), risks fragmenting markets into competing blocs rather than building a coherent global supply system.
Geneva Dry 2026: What the Shipping Industry Is Seeing on the Ground
The Geneva Dry conference, held on April 28 and 29 at the Hotel President Wilson in Geneva, drew a record 900 delegates from more than 220 companies. Geneva handles roughly 60 percent of global traded metals by market share, which means the people in that room collectively move a significant portion of the world's mineral cargoes. The minor bulks panel brought together executives from South32, Anglo American, Vale Base Metals, Cetus Maritime, and Asyad Shipping, and it covered territory that went well beyond standard freight market discussion.
Robert Haggquist from South32 told the panel that many governments are now actively building strategic inventories of key minor bulk commodities as a hedge against future disruption. That is a significant development. It means the demand signal for certain mineral shipments is no longer driven purely by industrial consumption. Governments are buying ahead, adding a precautionary layer to trade flows that did not exist at meaningful scale a few years ago.
Karim Coumine, Head of Commercial Shipping for Minor Bulk at Anglo American, addressed the copper market directly. He pointed to the persistent underinvestment in new copper supply: "There just isn't that great investment or amount of new investment in copper supply at the moment. It takes a lot of money to invest in a copper mine. It takes a lot of time to bring it online." Demand growth tied to electrification, electric vehicles, and industrial development continues to underpin copper concentrate flows from South America into Asia, but the supply side is not keeping pace.
Eduardo Luz from Vale Base Metals put the scale of the problem in concrete terms. "We see a need of 10 million tonnes of refined copper in the market," he said, while acknowledging that projects take a long time to come online. Vale's own plans call for its Brazilian copper shipments to double to 2 million tonnes by 2035, a significant expansion that still represents a fraction of the projected global shortfall. Building on my analysis of the US copper processing deficit in June, the supply gap Luz described is not a mining problem. It is a refining and processing problem that shapes every tonne of copper concentrate that leaves a South American port.
How Disruption Is Physically Redrawing Trade Routes
The Strait of Hormuz closure has introduced a new layer of complexity to bulk commodity logistics that extends well beyond oil. Fertiliser exports from the Middle East Gulf, roughly 36 million tonnes per year, have been interrupted, with knock-on effects as far as the US corn belt. Sulphur, which is essential both as a fertiliser feedstock and as a processing input for nickel and copper ore, is now being sourced from Canada's west coast rather than the Gulf. That substitution is generating new demand for Pacific supramax vessels and adding distance to supply chains that were calibrated for different geography.
Eduardo Luz flagged the sulphur issue at Geneva Dry with particular urgency. Sulphur prices have surged above $800 per tonne, sharply increasing nickel processing costs in Indonesia. "Sulphur is becoming a hot topic for base metals producers," he said. The connection is direct: Indonesia accounts for 43 percent of global nickel refining capacity, and disruption to its sulphur supply affects the cost and availability of a mineral that sits at the heart of battery chemistry for electric vehicles.
About 5 million tonnes of aluminium are shipped each year through the Strait from smelters in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Around half of global seaborne sulphur trade also moves through the Strait. BIMCO's Filipe Gouveia estimated that Hormuz disruptions affect roughly 4 percent of dry bulk cargo volumes and tonne-mile demand. That may sound modest as a percentage, but when the commodities affected are mineral processing inputs, the ripple effects multiply through entire value chains.
Oman is emerging as a new logistics node in response. Asyad Shipping's Imad Al Khaduri described the shift plainly: "We see Oman by default being a gateway for a lot of cargoes." His company is positioning Oman as a logistics and storage hub for cargoes that are bypassing disrupted Gulf routes. This is exactly the kind of route adaptation that UNCTAD's report anticipates, but it is being driven by conflict and instability rather than strategic planning.
The broader shipping market is reflecting these shifts. Seaborne dry bulk trade expanded by just over 2 percent in the first four months of 2026, reaching about 1.7 billion tonnes. Average time charter rates for panamaxes, supramaxes, and handysizes climbed 56 percent, 41 percent, and 34 percent respectively compared to the same period in 2025. Geared bulkers, the vessels best suited to handling the fragmented, port-constrained trades that characterise critical mineral cargoes, are in high demand. Port constraints remain a persistent barrier to vessel upsizing, as both Vale and Anglo American confirmed at Geneva Dry.
The Processing Chokepoint That New Shipping Routes Cannot Fix
New shipping corridors are real and consequential. They represent genuine adaptation by an industry responding to geopolitical pressure, demand shifts, and supply disruptions. But they do not touch the fundamental structural vulnerability that every serious analyst of this sector keeps arriving at: China's dominance in refining and processing.
The IEA data on this point is unambiguous. China is the dominant refiner for 19 of the 20 minerals the agency tracks, holding an average market share of around 70 percent. Between 2020 and 2024, geographic concentration in refining increased across nearly all critical minerals, with the average market share of the top three refining nations rising from around 82 percent in 2020 to 86 percent in 2024. Almost all supply growth came from the single top supplier: Indonesia for nickel, and China for cobalt, graphite, and rare earths. The IEA projects only a marginal reduction in refining concentration to 82 percent by 2035, effectively returning to the 2020 level after a period of further entrenchment.
Specific figures sharpen the picture. China accounts for roughly 99 percent of global gallium production, 95 percent of magnesium, 83 percent of tungsten, 79 percent of graphite, and more than 69 percent of all rare earths. For battery materials specifically, Chinese firms hold an overwhelming share of manufacturing capacity, giving China control over the middle and upper parts of the battery supply chain even when raw materials are sourced elsewhere.
The economic logic of this dominance is captured in a simple price comparison. In 2022, refined cobalt averaged $20.80 per kilogram. Raw cobalt averaged $6.60 per kilogram. The refining step adds more value than the mining step. As long as that value-addition capacity sits overwhelmingly in one country, rerouting the raw material around geopolitical flashpoints does not change who captures the economic and strategic leverage in the chain.
As I examined in my analysis of China's November 2026 rare earth export control deadline, the West's critical minerals problem is fundamentally a processing problem. UNCTAD's June report reinforces that diagnosis at the global scale. The concentration of refining has moved in the wrong direction since 2020, the period during which most Western governments were actively talking about diversification.
What Governments and Companies Are Actually Doing About It
The policy response is intensifying, even if its results remain largely prospective. The United States, the European Union, and Japan met at a Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington on February 4, 2026, and committed to a forthcoming Memorandum of Understanding covering mining, refining, processing, and recycling cooperation, as well as coordinated stockpiling discussions. Whether that coordination produces real industrial capacity or remains at the level of joint statements is the question that will define its significance.
UNCTAD counted 73 international mineral partnership agreements and instruments, with 58 of them signed after 2022. The pace of diplomatic activity is striking. The substance is more uneven. The report notes that agreements involving developing countries tend to focus more narrowly on extraction, with fewer provisions to support value addition. That pattern risks reproducing the same extractive dynamic that has historically left resource-rich countries exporting raw materials while value addition happens elsewhere.
The government stockpiling trend identified by South32's Haggquist at Geneva Dry represents a different kind of response: precautionary inventory-building rather than structural supply-chain reform. Strategic reserves can buffer short-term shocks, and their existence as a hedge against disruption is a rational response to the current environment. But they do not add refining capacity, develop skilled workforces, or change the underlying geography of processing. They are insurance policies, not infrastructure.
For developing countries, UNCTAD is direct about the stakes. The report warns that critical minerals trade sits at a crossroads: it can support export revenues, investment, and structural transformation in producing nations, or it can reinforce extractive patterns and fragment markets into competing blocs. The difference depends almost entirely on whether international agreements include meaningful technology transfer, skills development, and support for downstream processing, not just access to mining rights.
What Comes Next
The shipping industry will continue to adapt to fragmented, politically-shaped trade routes. That adaptation is already underway in the growth of transhipment operations for copper concentrate into northern Europe, in Oman's emergence as a logistics hub, and in the rising demand for geared bulkers suited to complex, multi-port itineraries. The Geneva Dry delegates who described this as the most complicated period they had witnessed in shipping were not being theatrical. The convergence of geopolitical disruption, energy transition demand, and supply-chain nationalism is genuinely unprecedented in its simultaneity.
The harder problem will take longer to resolve. Closing the processing gap requires capital, time, political will, and tolerance for the kind of long-duration industrial investment that market cycles alone do not support. China built its downstream processing industries at scale over decades through sustained state support. Replicating or offsetting that capacity elsewhere requires commitments of comparable scale and patience, precisely the kind of commitments that quarterly earnings cycles and electoral calendars make difficult to sustain.
UNCTAD will convene its Expert Group on trade, critical minerals, and the clean energy transition for further sessions after its inaugural meeting on June 11. The IEA's projection of only marginal diversification in refining concentration by 2035 sets a sobering baseline for how much is achievable in a realistic timeframe without a step-change in policy ambition. New shipping routes will keep emerging as the geography of supply evolves. The question is whether the industrial infrastructure at the end of those routes will be any more diversified by the time the next UNCTAD report arrives.