Fevers can do a lot of damage to people and, understood in a symbolic sense, to societies. And there are valuable natural resources that have produced fevers and various dramas in societies.
A gold rush is something already seen and suffered by many people. The word comes from the discovery of gold in California in the mid-nineteenth century, when thousands of gold prospectors came seeking fortune. They brought with them violence, unbridled ambitions and firearms to do justice or attack. Present similarities today is the wave of illegal gold mining fever in the Amazon areas of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia or Peru.
Similarly, the oil rush in the twentieth century generated migrations, produced investment, and changed the economies of several countries. Some of them went from being deserts marked by poverty and sparse population, to spaces with the highest per capita income in the world. But also, like the gold rush, it was the explanation – the "raison d'être" – of many geopolitical ambitions and international tensions, invasions and wars in the Persian Gulf, Nigeria or, more recently, in South Sudan.
If gold and oil have left that mark in which wealth has been combined with misery, economic growth with barbarism, it is worth asking what will happen to the lithium fever that is beginning. There is in this an eloquent fact of reality collected in a recent report of the International Monetary Fund in which it is indicated that to reach zero emissions by 2050 some metals such as silver, copper, nickel, graphite and rare metals will be key, all of which are abundant in Latin American countries.
Lithium has now become, if not the most expensive, the most desired metal in the world. This in the face of a growing demand for its role in batteries for an automotive industry that is leaving behind the combustion of oil. This directly touches Latin America because, as far as we have information, it is in this region where there are very large deposits of lithium.
The information available is still incomplete but there are relevant data. According to information from the International Energy Agency, Australia currently has 50% of the world's lithium refining capacity, followed by Chile with more than 25% and China with around 14%. As for reserves, however, the situation is different.
According to the US Geological Survey, only in Bolivia and Chile combined there are about 17 million tons of reserves; another two million in Argentina. Those of Australia would be very large but border on six million tons. The reserves in Peru – in areas bordering Bolivia/Chile – would seem to be important. There is still no full certainty of their volume, but it could be large where they are located. Lithium production in Latin America is still modest but increasing. According to The Economist, lithium production in Chile has already quadrupled between 2009 and 2022 and would continue to grow.
What comes next is the big unknown. An important question is how to prevent this wealth from being the basis of future "fevers", armed conflicts, international interventions, or a management by transnational spaces in terms of production volumes or trade systems that are totally beyond the control of the countries of the region. Some speak of a "nationalist" current that would aim at increasing state control of reserves and their extraction and processing.
Speculations aside, the fact is that lithium is of crucial interest for the present and future of several Latin American countries. Therefore, in anticipation of overflows, "fevers" and other damage that may accompany these processes, reality would advise that the countries of the region begin to address the issue. It may sound illusory to propose this in a context of a region disjointed with each other.
Great news that our countries have lithium reserves. It is at the same time a great challenge that together with that wealth do not come hand in hand, as with gold or oil, "fevers", wars and tensions. The challenge could, almost by chance, begin to generate multilateral spaces to talk first and then design common strategies that allow this wealth not to be the prelude to a "lithium fever" or the loss of control over this resource that will be crucial in this century and the next. May the tragedy of the COVID-19 vaccine not happen to us again, in which everyone danced on their own side and the pandemic with impunity generated tremendous damage in Peru and in the region.
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