An official trade partnership to source critical raw materials from Serbia is looming with negotiations at the final stages of legal wrangling, Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told Euronews during a high-level event in Brussels.

The trade deal between the EU and Serbia has been cooking for a while with the signing of a letter of intent last September — to strengthen and expand cooperation on critical raw materials and electric vehicles value chains — a clear signal that the EU executive and Belgrade were keen to join forces, provided that environmental and social acceptance challenges around the prospective mining region were sorted out.

On the sidelines of the EIT Raw Materials Summit held in Brussels this week Šefčovič referred to Serbia’s “unique position” in relation minerals listed in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), such as high-quality lithium, which he referred to as “one of the best in the world”.

“I hope that in a short period of time we will be able to finalise the text of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU),” Šefčovič told Euronews, adding that current discussions with the Serbian government are focused on extraction, processing, refining and use of lithium.

Original news published on Euronews website. Read the full article

What happened?

Serbia has signed a letter of intent with the European Commission on a strategic partnership in the areas of batteries and critical raw materials, including lithium. The letter was signed in New York on September 22nd, when Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, met Maros Sefcovic, a vice-president of the Commission, but the agreement became public only after an investigation by the Danas newspaper.

Why does it matter?

The agreement suggests that the government has not given up on a plan to allow the mining of lithium at Jadar in western Serbia, despite having cancelled an agreement with the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto in January 2022 in the face of mass public protests about potential damage to the local environment. The letter of intent adds to existing circumstantial evidence of the government’s intention to press on. In September the government signed an agreement with the Slovak company Inobat, a partner of Rio Tinto, on construction of a battery factory in Cuprija.

The exploitation of lithium could potentially be highly lucrative for Serbia. The country contains 1.3% of the world’s known reserves of the metal, which is essential for the production of batteries for electric vehicles. The estimated value of Serbia’s lithium of €4bn and its extraction over the course of a decade could potentially provide hundreds of jobs and a steady stream of revenue for the government. The EU could also benefit from the development of the Jadar mine, which would allow a reshoring of a vital resource at a time of growing geopolitical tensions and competition for minerals access.

In pressing ahead, however, the government risks a political backlash. Environmental groups and residents of Jadar have come out in opposition to the letter of intent. They have accused Mr Vucic and the prime minister, Ana Brnabic, of being traitors to Serbia and lackeys of the EU and Rio Tinto. The public debate over the agreement could be damaging for the government ahead of the parliamentary election in December. The government has denied that it has concrete plans to exploit the Jadar mine and insists that the letter amounts to no more than a statement.

What next?

The likelihood is that the mining project will eventually go ahead, given the backing that it has from the government, the EU and Anglo-Australian interests. However, in a replay of the dynamics seen ahead of the April 2022 election, the government is likely to stall the plans, reviving them only once the December election is over.

The analysis and forecasts featured in this piece can be found in EIU’s Country Analysis service. This integrated solution provides unmatched global insights covering the political and economic outlook for nearly 200 countries, enabling organisations to identify prospective opportunities and potential risks.

FEAR OF A RETURN OF THE MINES: Brussels is preparing a new law — the Critical Raw Materials Act — to facilitate mining in Europe. But activists are now mobilizing against it, warning the law would steamroll over local environmental opposition and even allow the construction of mines in protected natural reserves.

There’s always a news hook: “In Portugal the prime minister resigned over a probe into corruption over lithium mining,” Bojana Novakovic, a Serbian-Australian actor-turned-activist who is campaigning against mining projects, told Playbook. “Communities on the ground … have been expressing grave concerns about lack of transparency relating to this project for years.”

Corruption warning: “Corruption is endemic to mining, and the Critical Raw Materials [Act] is a law which would simply make more of that corruption legal,” Novakovic said. “It would make the lives of local communities, the lands we care for and the nature we live with even more difficult than it is now.”

Background: The law — currently in negotiations — establishes a benchmark that at least 10 percent of the “strategic raw materials” consumed by the EU should be extracted in domestic mines. As part of the measures to speed up mining projects, the regulation would reduce opportunities for local opposition groups to delay permits for new mines.

‘Overriding public interest’: The act currently sets a deadline for authorities of a maximum of 24 months to grant extraction permits. It also limits the public consultation period for environmental impact assessments to 90 days, pointing to an “overriding public interest” that such projects move forward.

Activists gear up: “The Critical Raw Materials Act is set to take a wrecking ball to human rights and environmental protection,” Laura Sullivan from the WeMove Europe activist network told Playbook. Together with Novakovic and other local organizations, WeMove is launching an online petition to scrap the act.

Re-shoring pollution: “Supplying Europe used to be a Global South problem and was arguably easier to hide,” Sullivan argued. “But the Critical Raw Materials Act will bring the mining scale up to European countries like Portugal, Spain, Ireland … it’s about to become a major problem for people in Europe.”

Environmental organizations have sent a clear message to Rio Tinto’s shareholders: the company’s insistence to carry on with the formally canceled project will only strengthen the opposition to it and the possibility of social unrest, carrying with it financial and political risk, the Marš sa Drine initiative and Earth Thrive said.

The protest was joined by the WeMove Europe and London Mining Network, which organized the arrival of activists from Arizona, Madagascar, and Serbia. A titanium mine is planned in Arizona, while in the island country Rio Tinto is operating a copper mine.

Of note, in 2023 Rio Tinto marks 150 years of operation.

Rio Tinto is not welcome in Serbia, activists said during the protest, which is part of a campaign called Rio Tinto: Against People, Climate and Nature and the International Day of Action against Rio Tinto.

The environmentalists also took 500,000 signatures to the door of Rio Tinto’s headquarters in London.

The representative of Serbian activists in London, Nebojša Petrović, a resident of the affected village of Gornje Nedeljice in the country’s west and a member of the Ne damo Jadar association, took the opportunity to ask the company’s officials why it hasn’t left Serbia after the spatial plan for a lithium mine and processing plant was annulled, and why it keeps buying land from private owners.

“The Ne damo Jadar association will fight Rio Tinto together with all other environmental organizations until it drives you out of Serbia,” Petković said.

He later explained he didn’t get any straightforward answer and that he also asked why the company insists on the project after the Serbian experts said that its implementation is the path to an ecological disaster.

They just said it was not true, Petković added.

Full article on Balkan Green Energy News

Australian-Serbian actress-turned-activist and campaigner tells BIRN that fighting for better air and healthier soil is more important than taking glamorous Hollywood roles.

Bojana Novakovic is a theatre but also a well-known film and TV actress, starring in popular award-winning movies and series. Currently, she is in the centre of attention for her roles in two series, “Love me”, which explores modern intimate partnerships and crime drama “Instinct”, where she co-stars with Alan Cumming. 

She is also known for her roles in Burning man, Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson and many others, and for classics such as the Oscar-winning I Tonya and multiple Emmy-awarded series “Shameless” and “Westworld”.

But since moving to Australia in 1988, as a seven-year-old, Novakovic, now 41, was not so famous in Serbia until recently. And surprisingly, it is not so much for her acting but for her activism. 

Novakovic has become one of the leading faces of Serbia’s growing eco-movement, which is currently focused on stopping the controversial lithium mining project of global mining giant Rio Tinto.

“They often ask me why I needed this. I could stay in my safe zone, acting and traveling, but sometimes I am offended by these questions,” Novakovic told BIRN in an interview.

“Do I need a reason to care about public health or collective happiness? Why do they need to ask me why I fight for better air and healthier soil in my country?” she asks.

She welcomes the fact that this is one of the rare interviews in which she is asked explicitly about her activism, or “social organizing”, as she calls it, not about her acting career and its glamour.

“I would be much more successful commercially if I was not doing this [activism]. When I do an interview, they always want me to talk like about, say, starring with Keanu Reeves, or shooting in an exotic location in Japan, and are dazzled when I say: ‘I am in Serbia, coordinating a campaign against the Rio Tinto lithium mining project,” Novakovic says. 

Novakovic has become a main face of the “Mars sa Drine” [“Get off the Drina”] campaign, which opposes the so-called Jadar lithium mine. She claims Rio Tinto has a “horrible reputation” and does not want it in the country

“It is not just a fight against the project, it is a fight for survival. The essence is to preserve what we have in ways that are healthy and not continue over-production and exploitation. This [project] is just packaged as healthy; it’s just marketing and it will not bring anything good to ordinary people,” she told BIRN.

From school protests to nationwide campaigns

Novakovic’s family has been always political, which has influenced her own social awareness. The fact that they left Yugoslavia just few years before the 1990s wars, which resulted in horrible crimes and the dissolution of a country, was another important factor.

“We did not have internet at the time, but we were following the news and my parents made constant calls to Yugoslavia, talking to friends and relatives in order to compare facts and see how they are doing,” Novakovic recalls. “I grew up in that kind of environment. There was always talks about politics and news on the TV,” she adds.

In the winter of 1996–1997, university students and opposition parties organized a series of peaceful protests in Serbia against the attempted electoral fraud of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Surprisingly, she was also there.

“They say to me, ‘You do not know how it was in the Nineties here’, and I say: ‘I do know, I was there!” she says, laughing: “My dad, I, who was a 15-year-old at the time, and my five-year-old sister came to Belgrade at the protests and practically spent three months on the streets.”

However, that was not her first step into activism. The year before, aged only 14, she organized an anti-nuclear protest in Sidney.

“We ended up on the news, like 3,000 students protesting, some schools were locked in order that others would not join us, we gathered in front of the French embassy, it was crazy,” Novakovic explains.

Novakovic later on volunteered to work with refugees during her time at college, since refugees and migrants are treated roughly in Australia, she says. As a by then established actress, she also worked in Los Angeles on jail reforms with different associations.

However, the campaign against Rio Tinto project was first time she entered the spotlight as an activist in a “leading role”.

“I never looked for it, it just happened,” she says. “The Kreni-promeni [Move-Change] organization called, since they’d seen me on a protest against police violence in US, and asked me for tips how to send a petition to the UN,” she recalls.

“After that, we organized a huge zoom meeting with activists and many Serbs in the diaspora who wanted to help as well, and realized that this is our struggle, the key issue. Everything just went on after that naturally,” she says.

Trump election was a wakeup call

From a young age, she says, her worldview had been linked with “the injustices of the global system”, but the year 2016 and Donald Trump’s election as President of United States was a turning point for her, when she became more active.

“When he won the election, I was like: ‘How is this possible, what world are we are living in?’ That pushed me more to learn about the history and systematic construction of the ‘westworld’ – about colonialism and the corporate – not political – system in the US,” she explains.

Asked why she dislikes Rio Tinto so much, she says that “wherever they go, there make problems for local people”, adding that she has worked with some Australian Aborigines who were victims of Rio Tinto misconduct in 2020.

“Also, to be clear, the lithium itself does not solve anything. Lithium will not create an electric car and for batteries you need cobalt … which comes from Congo, and we all know what is going on there,” she says.

“We do not want lithium mined in Serbia, we want those villages to remain green areas with fertile land, where food can be grown and where there are hundreds of species of animals, as there are right now,” Novakovic told BIRN.

According to Novakovic, industry needs to adapt and adjust to already existing resources and create a sustainable system of resource extraction.

“The solution is not to save the car industry, but green surfaces and biodiversity. The idea of mining a green area and calling it ‘green transition’ is absurd; it is crystal clear that profits are behind it all,” she insists.

Asked how her activism has affected her acting career, she says that it is tough, but that she was always like this, often refusing roles that could have made her wildly rich and famous.

“My father tried to teach me how to enter more commercial world and make healthier decisions for my career but I never make many compromises. Now I would make them, but I am too old for it,” she says, laughing, adding that she once refused a role in a sci-fi movie with Bruce Willis because the director wanted her to be naked.

Asked whether she think the campaigners will tire of the battle, since many powerful actors support the Rio Tinto Serbia project, she says no.

“The ruling [Serbian Progressive] party led by President Aleksandar Vucic} is putting a lot of pressure on us. Vucic is a neo-liberal, the nationalistic stuff is just a pose for voters, and he is ready to sell everything. The company [Rio Tinto] has a lot of money and they are very good at their jobs and creating anxiety – but that will not scare us,” Novakovic told BIRN.

“They are very patient – but so are we,” she concluded.

MELBOURNE, May 5 (Reuters) – Rio Tinto (RIO.AX)(RIO.L) is eager to reopen talks with the Serbian government about its $2.4 billion Jadar lithium project, which was blocked ahead of the country’s recent election, the company’s chief executive and chairman said on Thursday.

The Serbian government revoked licenses for the Jadar project in January after massive protests sparked by environmental concerns about the planned mine.

“We very much hope that we will be able to discuss all of the options with the government of Serbia now the elections are out of the way,” Thompson told shareholders at the company’s Australian annual meeting, in Rio Tinto’s first public comments following the election.

For the whole article go to Reuters.com

ONLY RED-ROOFED HOUSES interrupt the vast carpet of fields that surround the village of Gornje Nedeljice, in western Serbia. To resident Marijana Petković, this is the most beautiful place in the world. She’s not against Europe’s green transition, the plan to make the bloc’s economy climate neutral by 2050. But she is among those who believe Serbia’s fertile Jadar Valley—where locals grow raspberries and keep bees—is being asked to make huge sacrifices to enable other countries to build electric cars.

Around 300 meters away from Petković’s house, according to the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto, there is enough lithium to create 1 million EV batteries, and the company wants to spend $2.4 billion to build Europe’s biggest lithium mine here. But Petković and other locals oppose the project, arguing it will cause irreparable damage to the environment. When asked about that claim, a spokesperson for Rio Tinto told WIRED that throughout the project, the company has “recognized that Jadar will need to be developed to the highest environmental standards.” Petković is not convinced. “I want the western countries to have the green transition and to live like people in Jadar,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that we need to destroy our nature.”

Officially, the Jadar mine is not happening. After months of protests against the project, the government conceded, and in January it was canceled. “As far as Project Jadar is concerned, this is an end,” Serbian prime minister Ana Brnabić said on January 20, after Rio Tinto’s lithium exploration licenses were revoked.

There is widespread suspicion, however, that the project was canceled to stop protests overshadowing the presidential and parliamentary elections on April 3, and could restart if the government is reelected. “This might have been a pre-election ploy,” says Florian Bieber, a professor of southeast European history and politics at Austria’s University of Graz. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the government picks up this issue again once the elections are done, because they see the economic benefits.” A Rio Tinto shareholder expressed a similar expectation to Reuters, adding they expect the mine to be renegotiated after the vote. Rio Tinto denies this is its intention and says it has not planned or implemented any activities contrary to the project’s legal status.

Europe has big plans to phase out fossil-fuel cars. In July, the European Union proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035. The bloc wants to replace those cars with electric vehicles, built with locally produced raw materials like lithium. The top lithium producers are currently Australia, Chile, and China. But Europe has ambitions to produce more of the materials it needs for electric cars at home. These materials “are extremely expensive to ship and are transported across the world several times over,” says Emily Burlinghaus, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany. “So it’s much cheaper and much safer to have these operations close to battery manufacturing plants or auto manufacturing plants.”

For Europeans it’s also a security issue. “We cannot allow [the EU] to replace [its] current reliance on fossil fuels with dependency on critical raw materials,” said  Maroš Šefčovič, the commission vice president for inter-institutional relations, in 2020.

The problem is that Europeans don’t trust mining companies in their backyards. The resistance that Rio Tinto has faced in Serbia is not unique. Portugal also witnessed protests against lithium mining in October. The following month, mining company Vulcan Energy “paused” its lithium operation in Germany’s Upper Rhine region after facing community opposition to its plans. But the ferocity of Serbia’s opposition to the mine marks a major problem for the European Union’s ambitions to source lithium from closer to home. In 2020, Šefčovič said the EU cannot achieve its climate goals without raw materials like lithium, adding that the bloc will need 18 times more lithium by 2030, and 60 times more by 2050.

Rio Tinto’s charm offensive in Gornje Nedeljice started soon after the mining group discovered an entirely new type of mineral in the area in 2004. The mineral, called jadarite in tribute to the Jadar Valley where it was found, contained both borates and lithium—two materials that Rio Tinto says have a role in the green transition. Lithium is used in EV batteries while borates can be used in wind and solar projects.

In the years that followed, activists say, Rio Tinto employees made an effort to immerse themselves in village life. They turned up to villagers’ weddings and celebrated religious holidays with them. Adverts were also beamed onto local TVs telling villagers if they work with Rio Tinto, together they could save the planet.

Relations with locals were good in these years, according to Petković, who is a member of the local campaign group Ne Damo Jadar. The villagers weren’t too worried when Rio Tinto said it wanted to build a modest mine on just 20 hectares. “They said it is going to be a modern mine that will not damage nature,” Petković says. But last year, locals discovered that plans for their village had drastically changed. Rio Tinto wanted to build on 600 hectares, nearly the size of 10,000 tennis courts.

“We started to fight against the mine when they found out the company was lying to us for 14 years; when we found out how big the mine really is,” says Petković. Environmental concerns also started to emerge.

The Guardian obtained a study, funded by Rio Tinto, which outlined how the mine would cause irreversible changes to ecosystems and local rivers. The study recommended “the abandonment of planned exploitation and processing of the mineral jadarite.”

It was at this point that local anger toward Rio Tinto ignited national frustration toward Serbia’s relationship with foreign mining companies. Investors are drawn to the small country because it borders the EU but does not have the same strict regulations, says Bieber.

In April, thousands of people took part in protests in the capital Belgrade that became known as Serbia’s “environmental uprising.” Those protests continued on and off through the rest of the year. The movement “is not about one company,” says Žaklina Živković, an activist with the Right to Water initiative, adding that the government plans to open 40 mines in the next 15 years, including seven lithium mines. “Rio Tinto is a metaphor for all of the different investors and all the mines that are being planned in Serbia,” Živković says.

Arriving soon after a year marked by protests, this weekend’s election was supposed to be the breakthrough movement for Serbia’s environmentalists, says Engjellushe Morina, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Just as we were expecting that there will be a bit of a win for environmentally friendly movements in Serbia, we have the Russia debate,” she says, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She believes the return of war to Europe has empowered the ruling coalition parties and the incumbent president, Aleksandar Vučić. The ruling coalition which approved the mine, led by president Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party, was comfortably leading in polls as of Thursday.

Back in the village of Gornje Nedeljice, Petković has the sense that Rio Tinto is not worried about the election’s outcome. She believes the company has invested too much to stop, whatever the result. The miner has created its own technology to extract the jadarite, which is found nowhere else in the world. Since the government canceled the project, Petković says, there have been no signs Rio Tinto is preparing to leave. The machinery stayed, and the miner kept buying up local real estate, she claims.

On March 30 another activist organization, Marš sa Drine, published the details of a phone call that they claim proves Rio Tinto is preparing to restart work on the mine after the election. The phone call was between a University of Belgrade professor involved in the Rio Tinto project and an anonymous source impersonating an employee of Rio Sava, Rio Tinto’s Serbian subsidiary. In the conversation, the two discuss the arrival of equipment from the German company DMT and an Austrian company called Thyssen, which the professor said is “likely” to arrive in April. Neither DMT, Thyssen, nor the professor replied to WIRED’s request for comment. In a statement, a Rio Tinto spokesperson described the “alleged” recording as “misinformation,” adding that the agreement with the two suppliers was signed before its permission for the mine was withdrawn.

“They lied to us in January,” Marš sa Drine said on Twitter, urging their followers to vote against the project on Sunday. “Why is ANY equipment, no matter whether it’s a bolt or a bulldozer, being discussed within the context of a project that has been CANCELED?”

Some believe that Rio Tinto has faced so much opposition in Serbia because of the company’s legacy, associated with multiple cases of environmental damage. “Mining companies have been viewed so negatively historically that it doesn’t matter in the eyes of the public if they are transitioning to minerals that are being used for the energy transition,” says Burlinghaus.

Resistance to EV mining across Europe is not Nimbyism, says Diego Marin, associate policy officer for environmental justice at the NGO the European Environmental Bureau. “Communities are saying, ‘We’re having our areas devastated and sacrificed to make what? Cars for rich people that our communities can never afford,’” he says. “In the end, we pay the price that our air gets cleaner but our land gets poorer.” It’s not that these activists don’t want clean air. But an idea is beginning to spread among green groups in Europe: that the green transition is turning into a capitalism rebrand that is still focused on planet-harming mass production.

“The purpose of the green transition is to make an industrial transition sound like it fits in with a solution to a problem that cannot be solved through industry,” says Bojana Novakovic, an activist with Marš sa Drine and also an actress.

Officials have tried to reassure Europeans that this is a new era of mining. “Mining in the past was a very dirty operation,” said Peter Handley, head of the European Commission’s raw materials unit, speaking at a conference on “green” mining in Lisbon last year. “It is becoming highly technological these days.”

But Europe’s environmentalists are divided on whether “green” mining is possible, even by new companies that are untarnished by their history. “I don’t care whether Mother Teresa wants to extract lithium from the Jadar Valley; she wouldn’t be doing it on my watch,” says Novakovic. “There is no green way to extract lithium from fertile soil. Period. It has never been done before.”

Environmentalists cited an anonymous source who they said got the information from Associate Professor Saša Stojadinović from the Technical Faculty in Bor in a telephone conversation that Rio Tinto’s Serbian subsidiary Rio Sava ordered a machine to bore the mining shaft for its lithium exploitation project in the Jadar valley in the country’s west.

Biljana Stojković, presidential candidate from the We Must (Moramo) coalition and the Assembly of Free Serbia (SSS), Bojana Novaković from the Marš sa Drine initiative and Marijana Petković from the Association of Environmental Organizations of Serbia (SEOS) played an audio recording of a conversation, in which they claim was said that the equipment is supposed to be delivered by an Austrian and a German company. They said they didn’t name the individual that they got the tape from for the sake of the person’s security.

In an emotional address at a press conference in Belgrade, the activists stressed that the authorities in Serbia are still supporting Rio Tinto even though the project was officially halted in January. They called on voters not to support President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), warning that otherwise the project would be resumed after the April 3 elections.

The Jadar area is part of the City of Loznica administrative area. For the whole article go to Balkan Green Energy News.

Government revokes lithium mining licences after being accused of ignoring project’s potential for environmental harm

The Serbian government has revoked the lithium mining licences granted to the Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto after growing opposition to the company’s plans and souring relations with Australia after the deportation of Novak Djokovic.

Ana Brnabić, the Serbian prime minister, who faces a general election in early April, said all decisions and licences regarding Rio Tinto’s plans had been annulled because of environmental concerns.

The decision in effect pulls the plug on a potential $2.4bn (£1.8bn) investment by Rio Tinto in developing the country’s lithium resources, which could have made Serbia one of the world’s biggest producers of the highly sought-after metal used in the manufacturing of electric vehicles.

Original news published on The Guardian website. Read the full article

Serbia has withdrawn the exploration licences of Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto following weeks of protests over plans for a lithium mine.

“All permits were annulled… we put an end to Rio Tinto in Serbia,” Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said on Thursday.

The decision comes just weeks ahead of Serbia’s general election in April.

Relations between Belgrade and Canberra have also soured recently over Australia’s treatment and deportation of Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic.

Djokovic, the world’s number one men’s tennis player who was unable to compete in the Australian Open, has supported the protests against the controversial mine.

In December, he posted images on social media of demonstrators and green landscapes along with comments written in Serbian such as “clean air and water are the keys to health” and “nature is our mother”.

Read the whole article on BBC.com