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

Tanzania's Parliament enacted Act No. 5 of 2017, the Natural Wealth and Resources (Permanent Sovereignty) Act, as part of a landmark resource-nationalism legislative trio (alongside Act No. 6 on unconscionable contract renegotiation and Written Laws Miscellaneous Amendments No. 7), signed into law by President John Magufuli on 4 July 2017. The Act vests all of Tanzania's natural wealth and resources — minerals, oil and natural gas, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, water, and related sub-surface assets — as the permanent and inalienable property of the People of the United Republic, held in trust by the President on their behalf. Key operative provisions prohibit international commercial arbitration of natural-resource disputes (mandating adjudication within Tanzanian courts under Tanzanian law), empower Parliament to review and require renegotiation of any natural-resource arrangement containing "unconscionable terms," impose an in-country banking rule on earnings from natural wealth extraction, and authorise statutory override of contractual stabilisation clauses embedded in pre-2017 mining development agreements. The Act is the foundational parent statute underpinning all subsequent Tanzanian mining-sector reform, including the 2024 Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 4) Act critical/strategic minerals classification and the 2025 Finance Act mining amendments.

Bolivia's Ley N° 928, promulgated by President Evo Morales Ayma on 27 April 2017, creates Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) as a 100%-state-owned Empresa Pública Nacional Estratégica (National Strategic Public Enterprise) under the Ministry of Energy (Ministerio de Hidrocarburos y Energía), replacing the National Management of Evaporitic Resources (GNRE) that had operated under COMIBOL. YLB is granted exclusive end-to-end authority over Bolivia's entire evaporitic-resource value chain — from prospecting and extraction at the world's largest identified lithium deposits (Salar de Uyuni, Salar de Coipasa, Pastos Grandes) through industrialisation to commercialisation — with a full-vertical-integration mandate covering production and commercialisation of lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium chloride, lithium sulfate, potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, potassium sulfate, and downstream battery products. The law simultaneously carves lithium and evaporitic resources out of COMIBOL's general mining remit (amending the 2014 Ley 535 de Minería y Metalurgia) and establishes YLB as the operating authority for every contract, joint-venture, and concession over those resources.