Post date: Mar 31, 2012 6:23:34 PM
TOKYO, JAPAN (MARCH 28, 2012) (REUTERS - Japanese Trade Minister Yukio Edano got tough on the trade in rare earths on Wednesday (March 28), calling for manufacturers to decrease their reliance on Chinese supplies of the elements that are critical to electronics makers.
Japanese Trade Minister Yukio Edano pushes for the developed world to be less reliant on supplies of rare earths from countries like China, as Tokyo hosts a joint meeting with the U.S. and EU on the critical materials.
"I believe that we can build a global supply chain neither reliant on rare earths, nor on the countries that produce them," Edano said at a conference in Tokyo with officials from the United States and the European Union.
EU, U.S. and Japanese leaders formally asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) on March 13 to settle a dispute with China over Beijing's restriction on exports of rare earth elements found in a wide range of products from iPhones to wind turbines.
In a formal complaint to the WTO, the three trade powers accused Beijing of trying to hold down prices for its domestic manufacturers and pressurising international firms to move operations to China.
"It's been, among other things, the instability in price development which has made manufacturing of high-end technologies a global issue. And I think we have heard the voices of industry today taking note of them. And this is vital to take this agenda forward," said Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, the EU's ambassador to Japan.
The trade dispute is one of several between Beijing and the other three economic powers.
China says the export curbs are necessary to control environmental problems caused by rare earth mining and to preserve supplies of an exhaustible natural resource.
But the U.S. says it is ready to offer research that decreases the environmental impact from rare earth by-products like radioactive element Thorium.
"Rare earths can potentially be highly polluting. Thorium is usually captured with the rare earths, and we think that there could be a lot of science that could go into refining these processes so that you could actually decrease the pollution in the recovery of the rare earths," U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.
Though dependent on the outside world for vast qualities of industrial components such as iron and coal, China accounts for about 97 percent of world output of the 17 rare earth metals.