Green Extractivism: How Clean Energy Fuels Conflict in Myanmar’s Kachin State
Rare earth mining sites like this one leave long-term environmental damage behind. (Photo: Global Witness, 2024)
The water in Myanmar’s Kachin State tastes like battery acid. But speaking out about it could burn even worse, some locals say in a recent study, and you might not live to drink again. By the edge of an acidic pond, a man dressed in flip-flops and shorts lifts a murky bottle to his lips. “We drank contaminated water ... and when my friend reported it to the militia, they came. They beat him. Only after that did they buy drinking water for us.”
This testimony emerges from a British Academy-funded study published in The Extractive Industries and Society in January 2025. Conducted by a community-led research team from the Kachinland Research Centre, the study depicts the brutal reality of heavy rare earth element mining in Kachin Special Region 1, a mountainous corner of Myanmar that has recently become the world's largest supplier of these critical minerals, defined by the International Energy Agency (IEA) as non-fuel minerals vital to the functioning of modern technology. This includes elements, such as Dysprosium or Terbium, that are destined for the latest electric vehicle in a New York City showroom or a turbine catching wind in the North Sea.
The China-Myanmar nexus
“There’s an illusion that renewable energy is inherently clean. But this isn’t an energy transition—it’s an energy expansion. We aren’t replacing fossil fuels: we are stacking extraction on top of extraction.”
“The tightening of regulations in China pushed the extractive frontier across the border into Myanmar,” says Thea Riofrancos, a scholar of resource extraction and renewable energy at Providence College. In the borderlands, she says, “resources are particularly linked to conflict, as non-state actors seize control and use them to fund their operations.”
Since the 1980s, China has dominated the global rare earth market, both as producer and exporter. It holds 38 percent of the world’s reserves of these materials, and it supplies 88.2 percent of the products made with them. In 2010, when the Chinese government cracked down on illegal mining and imposed environmental standards, it began to outsource mining to Myanmar. By 2020, China’s annual imports of rare earth minerals from Myanmar had risen to 35,500 tons, making up 94 percent of its total rare-earth metal imports. This is a hundredfold increase since 2014, according to the new study.
The impact of “green extractivism"
In Kachin’s mountains, the mining industry thrives in the shadows of armed conflict, where control shifts between ethnic militias, the Kachin Independence Army and the NDA-K. These groups control the resource-rich lands and manage relationships with Myanmar’s army and state officials.
“It’s a textbook example of green extractivism,” says Riofrancos. “Governments and corporations frame renewables as clean, but their supply chains remain deeply extractive, often relying on militarized zones, exploitative labor, and environmental destruction.”
A rare earth extraction site, Kachin State. (Photo: Global Witness)
Past studies have examined drug economies in Myanmar’s extractive regions, but this research introduces a new angle: how “green extractivism” functions within a conflict economy. This poses particular challenges for researchers seeking to understand these dynamics. “Access to mining areas is politically sensitive, requiring researchers to be known by local organizations,” says Mandy Sadan, one of the study co-authors, in an email exchange.
Also at the local level, villagers may discover deposits on their land but are rarely informed before extraction begins. Mining companies instead pay armed groups for access. The companies engage in in situ leaching, a method once employed in southern China, in which ammonium sulfate is injected into the ground to dissolve minerals. According to the authors of the new study, the process poisons water, devastates farmland, and leaves a wasteland behind.
Kachin’s economy was once rooted in agriculture, but with the development of mines, it is now shifting as farmers are forced to sell their land. “It is not like before. We can no longer export walnuts or black cardamom to China,” a farmer from Kachin’s Bhamo District told the researchers. “We heard they tested our crops for chemicals. After that, we lost everything.”
A barely protected worker stirs acid into the water in a collection pond to help it more effectively leach rare earth minerals, which are later collected for processing. (Global Witness, 2022)
The environmental impact can be devastating. “The chemicals dry out the soil,” says a mine worker interviewed by the Kachinland researchers. “They leave the pools behind. No animals live there. Nothing survives in the river.” Jamie Kneen, co-founder of Mining Watch Canada, puts it bluntly: “Militias don’t clean up mining sites. And when one shuts down, another opens elsewhere.”
Last year, a Global Witness investigation documented the social effects that accompany mining. Teenage boys drop out of school to haul chemical-laden sacks. Young women, drawn in by social media ads, take jobs serving the Chinese workers overseeing the mines. Global Witness warns that without intervention, Myanmar faces “an escalating environmental and human catastrophe.”
“Extraction on top of extraction”
The mined materials currently make their way from Myanmar to China, brokered by companies including JL Mag Rare Earth and Yantai Zhenghai Magnetic Materia; those companies, in turn, supply Tesla, Volkswagen, and wind turbine giants like Siemens Gamesa, according to Global Witness. “There’s an illusion that renewable energy is inherently clean,” Riofrancos says. “But this isn’t an energy transition—it’s an energy expansion. We aren’t replacing fossil fuels: we are stacking extraction on top of extraction.”
In the face of these challenges, local people in many parts of the world are organizing to find protection. Juanita Sundberg of the University of British Columbia, who collaborates closely with land defenders in Guatemala, notes that in recent years, “the country has restructured its legal framework to ensure Indigenous communities are consulted about their property rights.” In Myanmar, several ethnic groups, such as the Kachin, have pushed back against the expansion of rare earth mining on their lands. Community leaders have also taken a stand against the military’s land seizures, though their efforts are often suppressed amid the broader instability of the country’s ongoing conflict.
Looking at the long sweep of history, Riofrancos emphasizes that it only took “five hundred years of extractivism for concerted social mobilization to force change.” Whether those lessons can reach Myanmar in time remains uncertain. What is clear, though, is that the world’s clean energy future continues to rest on dirty, contested ground.
