Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2662 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 4 February 2026, Argentina and the United States signed the Framework Instrument for Securing of Supply in the Mining and Processing of Critical Minerals at the inaugural FORGE Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington, DC. The instrument commits both parties to cooperation across the critical-minerals supply chain — exploration, mining, processing, refining, and value-added manufacturing — with lithium and copper as the primary strategic targets given Argentina's position as the world's fourth-largest holder of lithium reserves and an emerging copper producer in the Salta, Catamarca, and San Juan provinces. The framework is one of eleven founding bilateral instruments signed simultaneously under the FORGE (Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement) architecture and operationalises the Trump-Milei strategic alignment as a binding supply-chain coordination instrument. Argentina's mining-export trajectory is projected to surpass USD 20bn over the next seven years under the combined RIGI + bilateral-framework investment pull.

Decreto 449/2025, signed by President Javier Milei on 4 July 2025 and published in the Boletín Oficial on 7 July 2025, modifies Argentina's Mining Investment Law (Ley 24.196, in force since 1993) and the National Geological Information Bank Law (Ley 24.466), invoking the deregulation authority granted by the Ley de Bases (Ley 27.742). The decree (i) restructures the Article 10 fiscal-stability certificate, replacing the multi-jurisdiction tax-consolidation requirement with a single-date statement anchored to the feasibility-study presentation date; (ii) replaces the previous 1,000+-data-field investment-validation form with an annual sworn declaration accompanied by an independent third-party technical-attestation report (modified Article 18); and (iii) reassigns administration of the National Geological Information Bank from the Mining Secretariat to SEGEMAR (Servicio Geológico Minero Argentino), while requiring all Mining Investment Regime beneficiaries to submit surface geological data to the national database. Decreto 449/2025 is procedural rather than market-moving: it does not alter tax rates, royalties, or export duties, but it accelerates certificate issuance and reduces administrative friction for mining investors operating below the USD 200M RIGI threshold (Decreto 749/2024 / Ley 27.742). It complements the parallel Milei mining deregulation pipeline — RIGI for large investments, Decreto 563/2025 zeroing mining export duties, and the April 2026 glacier-law reform — and applies retroactively to pending proceedings.

On 27 June 2024 the Argentine Congress passed Law 27.742, the "Ley de Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos" ("Ley Bases"), the flagship economic reform of the Milei administration. The law was published in the Boletín Oficial on 8 July 2024 and Title VII established the Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (RIGI) — a promotional regime designed to attract large-scale capex into mining, energy, oil & gas, LNG, steel, forestry, tourism, infrastructure, and technology. Implementing Decree 749/2024 was issued on 23 August 2024 and the regime became fully operational with Resolution 1074/2024 on 22 October 2024. RIGI offers single-project vehicles ("VPUs") that commit at least USD 200M (with sector-specific thresholds rising to USD 600M and up to USD 2B for long-term "strategic export" projects) a 30-year regulatory, tax, customs and foreign-exchange stability guarantee. Headline benefits include a reduced 25% corporate income tax (vs. 35% standard), accelerated depreciation, full deductibility of inflation adjustments, an import-duty exemption on capital goods and inputs, a phased relaxation of central-bank obligations to repatriate and convert export proceeds (20% free after year one, 40% after year two, 100% after year three), and reduced dividend withholding tax. Disputes are subject to international arbitration under ICSID or UNCITRAL rules. As of mid-2025, RIGI's project pipeline reached USD 33.9B in submitted applications, of which roughly USD 15.7B (46.5%) had been approved across nine projects spanning steel (Sidersa), energy/LNG (PAE Southern Energy, YPF Argentina LNG), three mining projects, and infrastructure. The flagship approval was Rio Tinto's USD 2.5B Rincón battery-grade lithium carbonate plant in Salta (initial 53,000 t/yr, scaling to 60,000 t/yr by 2028) — the first mining project approved under the regime, on 21 May 2025. Strategically, RIGI is Argentina's bid to compete with Chile's lithium framework and Brazil's industrial policies for upstream-critical-minerals capex. Combined with the lifting of Argentina's FX controls (cepo cambiario) in April 2025 it sharply re-rates the country's project-economics math for multinationals — particularly in the Lithium Triangle, the Vaca Muerta shale, and pipeline/LNG infrastructure. Whether the 30-year stability guarantee survives a future change of government is the dominant political-risk overhang on the regime.