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The EU’s push to reduce its reliance on China for a range of critical minerals is failing as it struggles to both increase domestic supplies and boost imports from other countries despite a series of deals, a report has warned.

China dominates global supply chains for a range of metals and minerals that are essential for industrial manufacturing, spanning the energy, technology, defence and other sectors. Beijing showed its willingness to weaponise that control last year by ratcheting up export bans on the supply of certain rare earths.

The US, EU and other governments are now racing to build out alternative supply chains, hoping to reshore some of the mining and metal-making industry domestically while also looking to pen deals with other overseas partners that would secure long-term supplies of critical minerals.

But in a critical report on Monday, the European Court of Auditors, which monitors EU policymaking, said that the bloc’s “raw materials policy sets a strategic course, but rests on incomplete foundations”.

Targets set by the EU for domestic processing, mining and recycling of raw materials were “nonbinding . . . and lack justification”, it said.

Brussels has signed strategic partnerships on raw materials with 14 countries, including Ukraine and Canada, between 2021 and June 2025. But trade data indicates that imports from those countries fell between 2020 and 2024 for 13 key raw materials, although they rose for another 13 minerals, the paper found.

The bloc was solely reliant on imports for 10 out of 26 minerals designated as critical, the ECA found. That includes the rare earth metals that the EU needs for aerospace, electric vehicles and renewables, which are neither mined nor processed domestically.

An EU official noted that the report addressed data only up to 2024 when the bloc’s Critical Raw Materials Act came into force and had pointed to problems that the European Commission was already trying to act on.

The report comes as EU officials are due to attend a critical minerals summit hosted by the US in Washington this week aimed at reducing reliance on China.

Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, the former Estonian finance minister who led the ECA report, said that “even if the EU is doing everything right, trade distortions and geopolitical crises can still make access to necessary materials difficult”.

Developing new mines is time-consuming and capital-intensive, with projects often beset by delays and cost overruns. It can take decades between a deposit being found and a new mine coming online.

Brussels has chosen 75 strategic projects to benefit from streamlined permitting rules and access to investment, but it was “unlikely” that many of them would deliver in time to help the bloc meet its 2030 targets for developing domestic supplies, Pentus-Rosimannus said.

The vital midstream — the industrial processes needed to turn mined material into something that manufacturers such as carmakers can use — can be quicker to bring online, but margins are thin and it is energy intensive. Chinese industry has undercut western rivals in both the mining and the midstream processes, with Beijing’s state support for the sector making it very challenging for overseas rivals to compete.

The Commission said that “boosting the EU’s critical raw materials policy efforts in line with industrial priorities is one of our top priorities”.

It added that critical minerals was a “very young policy” area and that “progress is already visible and accelerating”.