Caught in the fishers' net? The colonial plunder of Western Sahara's natural resources

Caught in the fishers’ net? The colonial plunder of Western Sahara’s natural resources

Introducing a special issue of the Review of African Political Economy, Blanca Camps-Febrer and Enrique Bengochea Tirado argue that Western Sahara’s natural resources, above all its fisheries and phosphates, have driven successive colonial projects, first Spanish and then Moroccan. The territory is not an anomaly, they contend, but a clear case of how colonial and neocolonial dispossession is bound up with global capitalism.

The editorial traces the history from late Spanish colonisation and the 1975 Green March to the 1991 ceasefire, the military berm and Morocco’s settlement policy. It highlights the discovery of phosphates in 1947, a fishing sector that draws fleets from Morocco, Russia and China, and the October 2024 ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU that annulled the 2019 EU–Morocco fisheries and agriculture deals because the Sahrawi people had not consented. The issue’s articles go on to examine colonial political economy, fisheries value chains, artistic critiques of extraction and Sahrawi nationalist claims.

The authors welcome the EU ruling as a significant legal and political victory for Sahrawi self-determination, but warn that shifting extraction to other buyers does not dismantle the global structures of accumulation, and that imperialism in Africa is no longer only European. Sahrawi resilience under occupation, they conclude, endures.

Full article

Read the full article on ROAPE

Support our work