In the summer of 1967 representatives from Zambia, Chile, Peru and the Congo met in Lusaka, Zambia to discuss the future of the copper industry. The four countries accounted for 80% of world copper exports, and their economies were all highly dependent on the metal. Inspired by OPEC, the countries wanted to establish a similar kind of organization to regulate the markets in order to stabilize national revenue, and soon they set up CIPEC: the organization of copper-exporting countries. From the outset, the producer countries had high hopes, but while OPEC would go on to have significant impact on the world oil markets, CIPEC’s attempts would flounder, and the organization would gradually become irrelevant, eventually being disbanded in the 1990s.
Although eventually unsuccessful, CIPEC is an important example of south-south collaboration and in its early years it was considered both hugely inspirational (by other countries in the Global South) and as a potential threat to the international economic order (by the copper-importing countries). The aim of this paper is to analyze the early history of CIPEC with a special focus on the relationship between the two main drivers behind the establishment of the organization, the governments of Chile and Zambia, and the main international copper companies, most significantly Anglo-American and RST. The paper asks three main questions: why was CIPEC established, how did the collaboration evolve over time, and what impact did the large multinational copper companies have on the organization?
The paper is based on access to original source material from government archives in Zambia and Chile, in addition to company records of Anglo-American and RST.