Morocco seeks to double southern Sahara population with flood of investment | International

Nearly half a century after Spain left Western Sahara, barely 200,000 people live in the south of the former colony’s territory. Almost all of them are located in Dakhla (170,000 inhabitants), the old Villa Cisneros, stranded on a narrow peninsula between the turbulent Atlantic and the inland bay. Morocco has been promoting a flood of investment around Dakhla in recent years, especially since the United States recognized it in 20…

Almost half a century after Spain left Western Sahara, barely 200,000 people live in the south of the former colony’s territory. Almost all of them are located in Dakhla (170,000 inhabitants), the old Villa Cisneros, stranded on a narrow peninsula between the turbulent Atlantic and the inland Gulf. Morocco has been promoting a flood of investments around Dakhla in recent years, especially since the United States recognized in 2020 its sovereignty over a territory that the United Nations still considers “non-autonomous” or pending decolonization. The flood of billions in infrastructure such as a large port, and desalination and energy plants, aspires to regain the crown of control exerted on the Sahara by Rabat, whose authorities want to double the population census in its southern part through accelerating economic development planning, until reaching 400,000 inhabitants on the horizon of 2050. “Sustainable wind and more than 3,000 hours of sunshine per year are the best future for a clean energy economic ecosystem,” predicts Mounir Houari, director of Dakhla’s Regional Investment Center (CRI).

Last November, King Mohammed VI announced in Dakhla the so-called Atlantic Initiative to offer an exit to the sea for Sahel countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, whose representatives he met in Marrakesh the following month. The speech coincides with the 48th anniversary of the Green March, a massive human displacement organized by his father Hassan II to break into Spanish territory in the fall of 1975, when dictator Francisco Franco was dying.

The Maghreb country wants to replicate the growth multiplier effect in Dakhla and its surroundings that the construction of the Tangier Med port in the Moroccan Straits region demonstrated two decades ago, now with a projection towards central and western Africa. While Morocco focuses its investment plans for the Sahara in Dakhla, Laayoune and the north, where there are currently more than 700,000 inhabitants, officials expect population growth of only 5% over the next three decades.

Demographics is also a political weapon in the territorial dispute that hangs over the former colony, where one million people now live, mostly from Morocco. The Spanish National Institute of Statistics registered about 75,000 Sahrawis in the Sahara, along with 30,000 Spaniards, in a 1974 census, before leaving the territory. According to Spanish sources familiar with the former colony, the UN counted between 1991 and 2007, when the census preparations for the self-determination referendum were interrupted, about 130,000 potential voters of Sahrawi origin. The Polisario, for its part, assures that there are 173,600 refugees with the right to vote in the Tindouf camps.

The port of Dakhla Atlantic now emerges from the water 40 kilometers north of the city that gives it its name. Moroccan engineers show visitors the project on the wind-swept coast, in a desert landscape where some greenhouses emerge in the valleys. “The port’s infrastructure is destined to become one of the three largest ports in Morocco, after Tangier Med and Casablanca,” says a person responsible for the work. The new port facility is built as an artificial island from 2021, with a budget of more than 1,250 million euros. About a thousand technicians and operators already work there. The project is now 20% visible, and will not be completed until 2028.

A causeway (still a rock and earth dam) extends 1.3 kilometers from the sea to deep water. A portion of the dock closest to the shore is also emerging, one of the port’s three facilities: one for fishing, another for cargo (35 million tons per year) and a third for a ship repair yard. “It can be foreseen that green hydrogen and green ammonia obtained through renewable energies in the Sahara will also have an outlet through Atlantic Dakhla in the future,” estimates the director of CRI.

Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.

Subscribe

Next to the new port, it is planned to develop an industrial and logistics zone of 1,650 hectares, which will be connected to the new road communication axis of the Sahara. Morocco has announced the completion of a highway from Dakhla to Tiznit, 1,065 kilometers to the north, by the end of this year at a cost of around 1,000 million euros.

This whole network of infrastructure and massive investments is supported by two essential phases. On the one hand, a giant desalination plant producing 100,000 cubic meters of water per day in the desert. The Rabat government hopes to irrigate 5,000 hectares of land, where now only about 100 hectares remain, with greenhouses for the early harvest of cherry tomatoes and blueberries. On the other hand, a wind farm with the capacity to produce 40 megawatts and provide energy to all the planned facilities, at a cost of 200 million euros.

“The Tigris has already changed,” claims Houari, a London-educated economist and exponent of the new Moroccan technocratic class, who hopes to create about 100,000 jobs in the south of Western Sahara over the next quarter of a century. The director of the Dakhla CRI recalls that there are tax breaks and direct state subsidies to attract workers and companies throughout the region.

Since 2003, King Pelagic, one of Morocco’s largest fishing and canning companies, which exports to more than 50 countries, has located its factory near the current port of Dakhla. Fishing activity accounts for a quarter of the economy of the southern Sahara. In a tour of the King Pelagic facilities, it was observed that half of the workers (2,400 according to the company’s records) who work cutting fish tails or sealing cans are of sub-Saharan origin, most of them women. “They all have a contract and earn the minimum wage, around 320 euros a month,” says Reda Chami, the company’s general director, who assures that finding workers in Dakhla is not easy.

Promoting trade in the former colonial metropolis

In a presentation coordinated last April with the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, Morocco has for the first time stepped up to the former colonial metropolis of Spain to promote trade and investment south of the Sahara. Dakhla’s CRI has announced that the Spanish chain Senator is preparing to open a new hotel in the city. And, although Spanish fishing boats have not been fishing in Saharan waters since last summer, following the expiration of the protocols of the fishing agreement, there remain mixed companies with at least 51% Moroccan capital, owned by Spanish shipowners and equipped with boats with Spanish captains. The representative of the Polisario Front in Spain, Abdallah Arabi, warned then that investing in the Dakhla region is a violation of international law “by involving Spanish companies in the plunder of Sahrawi resources.”

Morocco is also sparing no effort to promote tourism in Dakhla, which is on track to go from 3,000 to 5,000 hotel beds, and show the world its development investment plans. Habat Michan Mohamed, 64-year-old vice president of the Dakhla Chamber of Commerce, also traveled to Madrid to attend the business forum last April. “We are an autonomous region, a region of Morocco. There are leaders here who come from the Polisario, and the UN knows this very well,” the hospitality businessman says in Spanish in his office in the coastal city. “In the face of political difficulties, development is imposed,” he insists, “We don’t want to be another Syria.”

Brahim Hameyada, 76, is a Spanish teacher and director of the Unamuno Academy, the only center accredited by the Cervantes Institute in Dakhla, who also speaks fluent Spanish, where he returned in 1992 after serving in the ranks of the Polisario Front in Tindouf as a cultural activist. Today it tries to safeguard the Spanish historical memory in the city south of the Sahara, since the first colonial military fort was built in 1886, which was demolished by Morocco a decade ago. “The Spanish heritage is still alive in the lighthouse, in the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, or in the areas of the old city,” he explains, “but despite the efforts of some of us, the language is being lost.” The son of a Sahrawi soldier of the colonial nomad troops, Hameyada has a Spanish passport. He prefers not to enter politics and focuses on his mission of teaching the language he studied as a child in Villacisneros. “Whether it is (merger, autonomy or independence),” he concluded, “but the Sahara conflict must reach a solution so that we can preserve our cultural identity, which is under threat.”

Follow all international updates Facebook And Xor in Our weekly newsletter,