The battle for accessibility for rare earths supply got nastier on Tuesday in what could be a show of force majeure when three economic powers - the U.S., the European Union (EU) and Japan - lodged a complaint before the World Trade Organization (WTO) agains the world's stronghold of rare earths, China.

"China's restrictions on rare earths and other products violate international trade rules and must be removed," Karel De Gucht, EU Trade Commissioner said in a statement. "These measures hurt our producers and consumers in the EU and across the world, including manufacturers of pioneering hi-tech and 'green' business applications."

"Because China is a top global producer for these key inputs, its harmful policies artificially increase prices for the inputs outside of China while lowering prices in China," a statement from the office of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said on Tuesday.

The three powers' gung ho approach meant to pressure China to ease its export policy on the precious minerals.

China, for its part, responded it is ready to defend itself and its policy on rare earths export restrictions, which it had said over and over again were motivated by environmental concerns.

"We feel sorry for their decision to complain to the WTO," Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology of China, told Xinhua, noting the country's export restrictions on rare earths is not pointed against a specific country, nor a kind of trade protectionism as most of the other countries have been saying.

Miao said some of the rare earth metals will only be able to last 20 years unless China self-restricts excessive mining at the cost of environment and resources.

Rare earth elements (REE) or rare earth metals are a set of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table, specifically the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. Simply put, these precious metal elements are used in a number of modern technologies ranging from applications in the military, medical, scientific, aerospace and consumer sectors, as well as the increasingly important "green" sector. REEs are the vitamins needed to support the shift from a carbon based economy to the new 21st century electron economy, according to the www.australianrareearths.com.

But rare earths are not really rare in the truest sense of the word. In fact, these are all over the world, with 36 per cent found in China and some 13 per cent, in the U.S. But because of their geochemical properties, it is difficult to find them in sufficient concentrations where they can be profitably mined and processed, according to a research paper commissioned by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

It can take up to a decade, upon discovery of a potential rare earths site, before a rare earths miner can actually even mining and extracting rare earths. Moreover, the process of extracting and processing rare earth elements into alloys and permanent magnets to be used in high tech applications is laborious and requires massive capital funding.

The United States, Canada, Australia and other countries used to mine rare earths but stopped in the 1990s as lower-priced Chinese rare earth ores entered the global market.

China slashed its export quota for the first half of 2012 by 27 per cent from the same period last year to 10,546 tonnes.