(Natural News)—China has just expanded its already tight restrictions on the export of technology related to refining rare earth minerals, which includes the production of rare earth magnets used in electric motors and generators as well as in the automotive industry and consumer electronics such as cell phones.
The communist nation, which controls 90 percent of the refined rare earth metal market, completely banned the rare earth extraction and separation technology. According to freelance writer and communications consultant Kurt Cobb, this recent move is part of a broader trade war between the United States and China over the exchange of technology.
President Xi Jinping’s commerce ministry sought public opinion last December on the potential move to add the technology to prepare samarium-cobalt magnets, neodymium-iron-boron magnets and cerium magnets to its “Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export.” In the list it also banned technology to make rare-earth calcium oxyborate and production technology for rare earth metals, adding them to a previous ban on the production of rare earth alloy materials.
Beijing is said to produce 60 percent of the ore, which means that the whole world is sending three-quarters of its ore to the country for processing, putting it in a commanding position to decide “who will get these metals and even whether the rest of the world gets any at all,” the analyst said. When China unexpectedly and dramatically reduced its rare earth exports in 2010, prices went skyrocketing. For Cobb, the Chinese would want to monopolize the market and even though America has made efforts to incentivize domestic mining of critical minerals, challenges remain due to the East Asian country’s market dominance. President Joe Biden’s administration allocated a small amount of budget to roll out a modest program to incentivize U.S.-based mining of critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt and manganese. However, it seemed to have failed.
“A private attempt to revive a closed rare earth mine, the largest in the United States, resulted in a colossal financial loss for investors when rare earth prices plummeted after China resumed its previous level of exports following the reduction in 2010,” Cobb wrote on his blogsite entry dated Dec. 24. “This shows how China can easily sabotage any attempts to challenge its dominance of the rare earth market.”
He added that the only reasonable way to break the Chinese stranglehold on the rare earth market would be for governments to guarantee the price of rare earth mined by domestic companies as CCP and its rare earth industry have a close-tie relationship. “In a world where the consensus regarding the free exchange of goods is breaking down and geopolitical interests are coming to the fore, China seems to care far less about living up to free trade rules than protecting its perceived national interests,” he said. “If other major trading countries and blocks start moving in the same direction, the easy availability of cheap goods and resources produced in faraway locales may become increasingly problematic.”
First U.K. rare earths hub launched
On the other side of the planet, a rare earth hub set up by the University of Birmingham, HyProMag Ltd and Mkango in Tyseley, central England, has already begun producing recycled rare earth for the magnets, an initiative re-introducing commercial sintered magnet manufacturing back into the U.K. for the first time in over 20 years.
Partners of the firm explained via a press release that Tyseley Energy Park is employing a mechanism dubbed Hydrogen Processing of Magnet Scrap (HPMS), a short-loop recycling method delivering materials that need only a few process steps to produce recycled ‘sintered’ rare earth permanent magnets that are made to recognized industrial grades. The process claimed to offer 88 percent energy saving and 98 percent human toxicity saving when compared to primary production and is considered a “cleaner and more energy efficient process than the traditional dismantling, thermal demagnetization and cleaning processes and lends itself to automated and efficient processing.”
At present, this is reported to be the only local source of recycled rare earth permanent magnets in the United Kingdom and is set to provide further customer and project partner samples. Commercial production is targeted for 2024, with initial throughput targets of 20 tons per year of rare earth magnets and alloys, scaling up to a minimum of 100 tpa in subsequent months. (Related: Demand for “critical” rare-earth minerals soars amid rapid growth of “clean” energy industry.)
Analysts are closely watching if China would also find a way to hinder its operations as well.
Head over to CommunistChina.news for more stories similar to this.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
YAAAAWWWNNN!
THIS was predicted beginning around 15 years ago — while today the Biden regime and commie corporations are doing everything possible to exhaust the American supply of it: notice all those WI–FI enabled scooters and electric bikes and . . . Oh, Yes! EVs?!?!
AAU Started providing academic services in 1990, Al-Ahliyya Amman University (AAU) was the first private university and pioneer of private education in Jordan. AAU has been granted institutional and programmatic accreditation. It is a member of the International Association of Universities, Federation of the Universities of the Islamic World, Union of Arab Universities and Association of Arab Private Institutions of Higher Education. AAU always seeks distinction by upgrading learning outcomes through the adoption of methods and strategies that depend on a system of quality control and effective follow-up at all its faculties, departments, centers and administrative units. The overall aim is to become a flagship university not only at the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan level but also at the Arab World level. In this vein, AAU has adopted Information Technology as an essential ingredient in its activities, especially e-learning, and it has incorporated it in its educational processes in all fields of specialization to become the first such university to do so.