India–Brazil Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Critical Minerals

Mechanism

The MoU is a head-of-state-level bilateral framework — not a binding-quota or financing instrument — that establishes a government-to-government channel covering the full critical-minerals value chain:

• Exploration: joint geological-survey projects to identify

high-potential deposit zones (Brazil's National Mining Agency / ANM and the Geological Survey of Brazil / SGB on the Brazilian side; India's Ministry of Mines, Geological Survey of India, and Khanij Bidesh India Ltd / KABIL on the Indian side).

• Mining and processing: reciprocal investment, technology and

innovation collaboration, and supply-chain resilience-building across the upstream-to-midstream stack.

• Recycling and refining: explicit inclusion alongside extraction

— a meaningful framing for India given its 2025-11-26 REPM Sintered Rare Earth Magnets Scheme demand and Brazil's stated ambition to move up the value chain rather than export raw ore.

The instrument was one of ten documents signed at Hyderabad House on 21 February 2026 in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Lula da Silva. It is paired with a broader India–Brazil Joint Statement that sets a USD 30 billion bilateral-trade target by 2030 (roughly doubling the current ~USD 12 billion) and frames a ten-year strategic-partnership roadmap covering AI, defence, energy, agriculture, and digital transformation.

Why this matters

Brazil holds the world's second-largest rare-earth-oxide repository (~21 million tonnes REO equivalent per USGS), ~95% of global niobium reserves, the world's fourth-largest manganese reserves (~270 Mt), ~2.7 Bt of bauxite, and 0.4 Mt of lithium. India is structurally short on most of these and has built a dense industrial-policy stack around the demand side — the 2025-01-29 National Critical Mineral Mission, the 2026-02-01 Semiconductor Mission 2.0, and the 2025-11-26 REPM Sintered Rare Earth Magnets Scheme. The MoU is the upstream-supply counterpart to that domestic demand build-out.

It is also the first major head-of-state-level critical-minerals MoU in the Global-South-to-Global-South register — distinct from the US-led 2025-10-20 US–Australia, 2025-10-26 US–Malaysia, 2025-10-27 US–Japan, 2026-02-04 US–Uzbekistan, and 2026-04-24 EU–US instruments, which are anchored on Western consumer-side diversification away from Chinese processing dominance. India–Brazil is the non-Western axis of the same diversification drive.

Downstream implications

• Reciprocal-investment and technology-transfer channels for IREL,

KABIL, JSW, and Coromandel into Brazilian REE / lithium / niobium / manganese projects.

• Operationalises the upstream layer for India's 2025-11-26 REPM

scheme — the single biggest gap in India's REE-magnet industrial-policy chain is heavy-rare-earth oxide feedstock.

• Anchors Brazil's "move up the value chain" strategy under

2024-01-22 Nova Indústria Brasil and the queued PlanGEO 2026-2035 decennial geological-survey plan, which the MoU's joint exploration projects will sit on top of.

• Establishes a bilateral channel that bypasses Chinese REE

processing — directly responsive to the 2025-04-04 and 2025-10-09 MOFCOM heavy-REE export-licensing waves.

Open questions

• Locate the canonical Brazilian Itamaraty / Planalto counterpart

joint-statement page and capture the exact Portuguese-language framing (the MEA URL is the Indian-government anchor; the Brazilian side has not yet been pinned down).

• Confirm whether the agreement is between India's Ministry of Mines

or Ministry of Steel — secondary-source reporting diverges, with Mining Journal and broader specialised press citing Ministry of Mines while at least one wire conflated this MoU with a separate steel-cooperation MoU also signed at the summit.

• Track whether a binding implementing instrument (joint working

group, project pipeline, financing mechanism) follows in 2026-27; framework MoUs at this level often languish without an implementing decision.