POSITION ON THE CRITICAL RAW MATERIALS ACT

The Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic welcomes the draft Critical Raw Materials Act, the EU has to enhance its economic resilience and to mitigate the risks for supply chains related to strategic dependencies. The proposed Regulation sets out a regulatory framework for supporting the development of EU’s capacities and for enhancing sustainability and circularity of EU’s supply chains in terms of critical raw materials. The related EC’s Communication adds measures to promote supply chain diversification via new mutually supportive global partnerships.

Critical raw materials are crucial for a wide range of strategic sectors, including net zero industry, the digital sector, engineering, aviation as well as defence and the space industry. Even if it is foreseen that the demand for critical raw materials will continue growing significantly in future, the EU remains strongly dependent on their imports and it is often from quasi-monopolistic third-country suppliers (currently, the EU is particularly dependent on China – for example 97 per cent of the EU’s consumption of magnesium and almost all of the EU’s need of heavy rare earth materials come from the PRC).

Our Confederation fully supports the efforts of the European Commission to support domestic extraction of rare earth materials, however, we remain sceptical as regards the proposed speed of strengthening EU’s capacities in this respect due to the lengthy and demanding procedures of current authorisation processes. In several aspects we also find it essential that the proposed Regulation be modified and amended. The primary goal of the new Regulation should be to support companies in order to be able to secure the critical raw materials they need, and to enhance the development of new, alternative materials thus mitigating dependency risks on specific countries.

Source: spcr.cz