Once upon a Rio Tinto mining project

As electric cars get pushed to the forefront as bulwarks of the ‘green’ economy, there’s a global resource crunch – demand for lithium used in their batteries is outstripping supply. No wonder then that the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto has been prospecting for new locations to dig it up. This search led it to Serbia – not because it has the richest stores of the soft metal but because it is a relatively low-income country with high unemployment, an increasingly authoritarian political regime, weak regulation and a seeming lack of any political project other than ‘catching up’ with the EU. The ground was laid for the $2.4 billion Jadar project, named after jadarite, a lithium sodium borosilicate whose deposits the company discovered in western Serbia in 2004.¹

But Rio Tinto’s proposed ‘green’ investment in Serbia, supported by the EU’s ‘green’ policy agenda and many foreign officials, encountered a major snag – Serbian protesters. That’s what happens when the so-called pursuit of sustainability, instead of questioning the organization and priorities of richer societies, relies on destruction in far-off lands. For three consecutive weekends in November and December 2021, protesters – in numbers unseen since the toppling of Slobodan Milošević in 2000 – blocked highways in many Serbian cities demanding an end to Rio Tinto’s plans on the grounds that they were detrimental to the environment and the local rural community. The strength of feeling in the country after years of resource plunder, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, has made the environment a popular and uniting cause. The mobilizations were enough to show Rio Tinto the red light – for the time being.

But short-term street protests are not enough to put a definitive end to projects of such enormous interest for Rio Tinto’s shareholders and EU governments. A few days after elections in April 2022, Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s re-elected president, said that the decision to stop Rio Tinto had been a mistake. Rio Tinto continues to ‘believe in Jadar, a world-class project with the potential to play an essential role in the transition to a low carbon future’. Without a change of power in the country, it looks likely that plans would still proceed when the peak of mobilization falters and the convenient moment comes. The green-left coalition Moramo failed to unseat Vučić primarily because it did not offer a real alternative to the dominant paradigm of ‘catching