The Sahrawi fisheries sector in the world economy: extraction, industry and commercialisation under occupation

The study of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara has traditionally been approached from the perspectives of legal or political conflict analysis, often overlooking the defining significance of the conflict’s political economy. However, in recent decades, the fisheries sector has come to play a decisive role in the territories and can thus serve as an analytical vantage point from which to explore the detailed workings of occupation within the global capitalist economy. This article examines the development of the octopus and sardine industries in Western Sahara. It identifies the local, Moroccan and transnational actors that promote and have benefited from the globalisation of production in recent decades. The article highlights how the dispossession and exploitation of fisheries resources play a critical role in strengthening Morocco’s settler colonial project and semi-peripheral position, while also serving global capitalist elites and their control of, and profit making via, global value chains. Far from being an exceptional practice, occupation provides a controlled space of accumulation for global and Moroccan elites, as well as a handful of Sahrawi actors, fitting smoothly into historical dynamics of imperialism.