Investigating supply chains for rare earth mined in Myanmar

Emily Fishbein

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Freelance journalist, Pulitzer Center Rainforest Investigations Network fellow

GIJC, November 22, 2025

Image: supplied by an anonymous source

Illustration by JC

A quick note!

• My work on tracing rare earth supply chains originating in Myanmar is preliminary and ongoing. I consider myself more of a work-in-progress than an expert.
• So far, I have mainly focused on the beginning of this supply chain – mapping out the business networks in Myanmar, the mining process, and the ways rare earth moves across the Myanmar-China border – with the hope that this work can help pave the way for further investigative work by me and/ or others.
• I welcome your suggestions and would be happy to discuss opportunities to collaborate!

“China’s [rare earth] processing industry, and its downstream metals and magnets industry, are effectively a coffee maker. Myanmar goes into the top of that coffee maker and gets ground up with all of the material mined in China, the other material imported from abroad…and then it all feeds into metal factories and magnet plants, and therefore, there are some grains of coffee inevitably that will be from Myanmar.”

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“Unless you’re on the floor and you can kind of track the molecules down the separation line and then follow it to a metals and magnet plant, it becomes really, really tricky.”

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-Ryan Castilloux, founder and managing director, Adamas Intelligence (critical minerals supply chain tracing company)

Start of the supply chain

Source: Patrick Meehan and Dan Seng Lawn, The Rare Earth Mining Process in Myanmar (2025)

In-situ leaching methods

Sources: Public TikTok and Facebook posts

Context

• China processes most of the world’s rare earth, but has increasingly restricted domestic mining since the early 2010s in response to the harmful impacts.
• Chinese companies have since been mining rare earth just across the Myanmar border, in areas administered by ethnic armies.
• Chinese companies typically partner with local businesspeople and armed authorities to mine rare earth, which they transport by land into China for processing.
• The 2021 military coup caused a collapse in the rule of law in Myanmar, further enabling rare earth mining to expand. At the same time, armed conflict and political instability have caused major disruptions to the industry.

Challenge: Data scarcity

• Rare earth mining areas are heavily militarized and highly secretive. Outside access is extremely limited.
• There is limited telecommunications access in mining areas, making it hard to interview people.
• Rare earth mining workers lack access to basic information including their company names or the chemicals used in the mining process. Some workers do not even know they are mining rare earth.
• Rare earth mining companies prohibit workers from posting photos or videos or speaking to the media. Other sources are also often afraid to speak to the media.
• Myanmar’s corporate database reveals limited information, and even less since the 2021 coup.
• Rare earth mining companies typically operate through agreements with local armed authorities. There is no publicly-accessible mining permit data.
• Neither the Myanmar military nor armed groups controlling border areas publish import or export data.

With that in mind, here are some methods I used:

INTERVIEWS

For this reporting, sources included mining workers, local community members, academic researchers, NGOs, supply chain tracing experts, activists, civil society workers, and armed group spokespersons.

→ Due to source safety concerns, most interviews were anonymous and many were off-the-record. Still, each interview helped to build up a better understanding of the industry.

→ Sources have also provided valuable photos, videos.

→ To protect vulnerable sources, removed metadata + identifying information from photos/ videos before publishing.

→ Due to the data/ information vacuum, rumors spread easily. It has been important to differentiate between firsthand and secondhand information from sources, and to cross-check information with other data sources.

Images supplied by sources

PUBLISHED REPORTS

News/ media articles, academic research, NGO reports

→ Published reports can be a good source of visual evidence (with additional verification)

→ Propaganda outlets sometimes have useful clues/ information that may not be published in other places.

→ Small, local outlets often publish detailed accounts of daily news and events.

→ Check reports on other industries with overlapping business networks/ supply chain pathways.

SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH

→ Useful for identifying visual evidence, researching people, companies, networks

→ Identify key accounts and trace comments, tags, followers to understand networks

→ Can help to develop timelines of key events (with proper verification)

→ For key posts/ visuals, important to verify posting date/ caption (geolocation, chronolocation)

→ For digital safety, use a research account/ anonymous browser, VPN. Download/ save important material in case the post gets taken down.

→ Different social media platforms may have unique value (For this project, we mainly used Facebook, TikTok, Douyin and Telegram).

→ For this project, we looked on anonymous/ propaganda accounts, business pages, work recruitment pages, buying/ selling pages, public posts from family members/ friends of businesspeople.

→ Even if an account is not trustworthy/ reliable, it may still have useful information.

Sources: Public TikTok and Facebook posts

CORPORATE RECORDS

→ Do not take all corporate records at face value. However, even incomplete/ falsified records can reveal useful information about business networks and the ways businesses operate.

→ If working across multiple alphabets/ languages, be sure to check for different spellings.

→ Check multiple ways of writing a name (abbreviations, name order, use of middle name) to catch all information.

→ Cross-check information as much as possible (birth date, ID number, photo, etc) to avoid mistakes.

→ Key businesspeople may use proxies like family members or close associates on company documents.

→ Collaborate with specialists for large datasets, complex network analysis.

CUSTOMS DATA

→ If the country you are researching doesn’t publish import/ export data, look at data from other countries that import/ export to that country.

→ Seek out expert assistance in identifying relevant HS codes.

→ Can look at import of necessary supplies as well as export of product

→ Cross-check with other data points as much as possible.

SATELLITE IMAGES

• For this project, we used satellite images to identify mining site locations, track the expansion of mining over time, and document deforestation at mining sites.
• Potential to use satellite images to track the movement of vehicles, goods across borders (area for further research)

→Identify partners with access to different image sources, expertise

P. Oswald (2025) using Google Earth, Bing, Planet images, topographic data from MIMU, OpenStreetMap

Myanmar Witness using data from Airbus, Planet and Copernicus Sentinel-2

https://www.info-res.org/reports/unearthing-the-hidden-costs-myanmars-rare-earth-mining-boom/

Lessons learned

• Value of collaboration and strategic partnership
• Always cross-check. Don’t take a single data point (or multiple data points from the same source network) at face value.
• Building trust with sources over time is essential.
• Anonymous sources/ off-record interviews can be valuable sources of information.
• Even if one line of research does not lead to a breakthrough, it can provide useful information/ context down the road.
• Investigative work in data-scarce contexts can be laborious, but sometimes breakthroughs come when you least expect it.

Areas for further research/ collaboration (feel free to reach out!)

• Tracing the import of the chemicals used in rare earth mining into Myanmar
• Looking at how rare earth moves across Myanmar’s borders
• Investigating foreign investments in Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry

Thank you!

Email: EmilyFishbein@proton.me

LinkedIn: Emily Fishbein