How Countries Make What They Make
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) holds roughly seventy percent of the world’s mined cobalt, a metal essential to lithium-ion batteries, aerospace alloys, and a growing share of medical devices. It does not refine most of it. The ore leaves the country in trucks, crosses into Zambia or Tanzania, and is shipped to refiners, overwhelmingly Chinese, who turn it into the cathode-grade material that battery makers actually use.
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The DRC sits on the resource. The capability to convert it into something the world wants sits elsewhere.
This is not a story about colonialism, or corruption, or commodity prices, although all three are part of it. It is a story about the difference between having something and being able to do something with it. That distinction is the subject of this post.
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