U.S. backtracked on critical mineral, data demands in health deal with Zambia

The Trump administration backed away from several controversial early provisions in a billion-dollar health deal with Zambia, including one that sought greater U.S. access to critical mineral reserves, according to texts of the final agreement reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the negotiations.

The deal, which U.S. and Zambian officials signed Thursday in Lusaka, also removes references to a data-sharing agreement that had provoked a backlash in Zambia. The United States committed $1.514 billion in funding over five years, an increase from the just over $1 billion proposed in earlier drafts.

The agreement took almost a year of often-bitter negotiations. In May, Zambia’s foreign minister, Mulambo Haimbe, slammed the outgoing U.S. ambassador as “undiplomatic” and accused the U.S. of making “unacceptable” data-sharing demands while criticizing Washington’s “insistence on preferential treatment of U.S. companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.”

The State Department denied that it had made any concessions in the final health deal, writing in an emailed statement that the assistance was “not conditional on any commercial agreements” and that it had sought data only for program monitoring, adding that it was working with Zambia and other partner governments to “ensure there is clarity” on this issue.

Activists have described the final agreement as a victory for Zambian independence and for the communities that rely on health funding. Without their pressure, “Zambia would have signed off on a rapacious agreement,” said Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, an international organization that advocates for access to HIV treatment and prevention services, adding that the Trump administration had been trying to “hold HIV treatment contingent on plundering mineral wealth.”

The dispute over U.S. assistance to Zambia, where roughly one in 10 adults are believed to be HIV-positive, became an early flash point in the “America First” global health policy, created after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

The administration claims its new approach of negotiating bilateral deals directly with governments and cutting billions in U.S. funding ensures self-sufficiency among the recipient countries, which are required to spend more of their own money to complement U.S. assistance.

But negotiations on health assistance have been mired in secrecy amid widespread claims that the Trump administration is pressuring foreign governments to accept exploitative deals.

The State Department said last week that agreements were signed with 35 governments. Ghana, Namibia and Zimbabwe have all publicly rejected proposed U.S. health agreements, with Zimbabwean officials accusing the U.S. of seeking terms that they said infringed upon their country’s sovereignty.

The downturn in U.S. health funding in southern Africa, the global center of the HIV pandemic, has alarmed many experts inside and outside government. The administration has cut South Africa, which has the largest HIV-positive population in the world, out of all U.S. foreign assistance funding last year after President Donald Trump’s claims, disputed by experts, that the black-majority country mistreats White Afrikaners.

The U.S.-Zambia health deal was originally expected to be signed late last year but got stuck in limbo after the Trump administration linked it to securing access to Zambia’s abundant copper deposits, a metal vital to artificial intelligence infrastructure and high-tech military hardware. China dominates the processing and refining trade in copper, which has been deemed a national security risk by the Commerce Department.

In December, a U.S. delegation met with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema in Lusaka. There, senior State Department official Caleb Orr told Hichilema that Zambia could have “the opportunity to lead and benefit from the Trump Administration’s new approach to foreign assistance” and that the administration was planning to “leverage U.S. assistance to bring about reforms that will unleash business investment,” according to a statement released after the meeting.

The Zambian government was given until April 1 to accept the terms of a separate commercial deal or any health funding would be “terminated,” according to a draft reviewed by The Washington Post.

The new agreement strips that provision, as well as another that required Zambia to share pathogen data for 25 years and health data for 10 years.