Black takes DFC to Madagascar: financing as the counter-offer.

President Trump is looking out for the American people and has made securing our critical mineral supply chains a national priority. Through projects like Harena, DFC is helping expand America’s access to these essential materials and providing our partners transparent, high-quality financing alternatives. DFC is proud to support investments that strengthen U.S. economic security and create lasting economic opportunity for both the United States and Madagascar.

The project is early — development funding for the Harena rare earths mine, DFC’s first mining investment in Madagascar — but the sentence doing the work is about the instrument, not the deposit. “Transparent, high-quality financing alternatives” is the counter-offer stated as policy: DFC competing for partners against opaque, state-directed lending on the quality of the financing itself. That is the same argument Black has been building since Lobito, now applied at the project-development stage, where promising deposits either become investable projects or don’t.

The deposit matters too. Ampasindava is one of the largest ionic-clay rare-earth deposits outside China, weighted toward the heavy rare earths that go into permanent magnets — the segment of the supply chain where Chinese concentration is most complete. The release places Harena in a portfolio alongside Serra Verde and Aclara, which is the tell: this is allied supply-chain construction by accumulation, one financed project at a time, announced the same day the White House convened its mining roundtable.