‘Stolen goods’ we rely on
GROWING PAIN
New Zealand's dangerous addiction to fertilizer
The longest conveyor belt in the world starts the journey of a precious rock that New Zealand is accused of plundering from the Sahara. National Correspondent Charlie Mitchell reports.
The cycle that underpins New Zealand’s economy starts with a town in the desert, shielded by a minefield.
A white, dusty rock is stripped from the earth and put on a conveyor belt, which rumbles slowly across the Sahara – flat, desolate and silent – for 100 kilometres. It leaves a cloud of dust so vast it can be seen from satellites, etching a scar across northern Africa.
When it reaches port, the rocks topple off the belt and are loaded on to trucks, which are driven to awaiting cargo ships. They sail a tedious route south, ducking beneath the horn of South America to avoid nations that may confiscate the cargo.
The ships arrive at their destination: it could be Bluff, Dunedin, Lyttelton, Napier, or Tauranga, depending on who is buying the cargo.
The rock is driven to a factory and blended with other rocks, mixed with sulfuric acid, and compressed into small, white balls. The balls are dropped with precision from planes over the countryside and bleed into the soil, releasing nutrients into plants, which are eaten by sheep and cows, which are eaten by us.
The scale of the operation is enormous. Not only is the conveyor belt the longest in the world, so is the minefield protecting it. The trade – which has gone on for decades – is worth tens of millions of dollars each year.
Many countries use phosphate fertiliser, but few have hitched their wagons to it like New Zealand, which is uniquely reliant on pastoral farming, revolving almost entirely around grass. Animals need grass, which grows with nutrients from the soil. To put nutrients in the soil, farmers use fertiliser.
Most of the phosphate rock dug up from that mine in the Sahara ends up as Superphosphate, the most commonly used fertiliser in New Zealand. If farmers stopped using it, agricultural productivity would halve, and the export economy would contract by 20 per cent, according to some estimates.
The problem with phosphate is that there’s a finite supply – it can only be stripped from the earth.
Most of the world’s phosphate reserves are in the Sahara desert, in mines controlled by Morocco.
Morocco controls 70 to 80 per cent of the world’s phosphate rock reserves. The country with the next largest supply, China, has about 3 per cent.
Some of that phosphate isn’t in Morocco proper. It’s in a bitterly disputed territory known as Western Sahara, which was ruled by Spain but which Morocco has since claimed as its own, against the wishes of the indigenous Saharawi people.
It is one of the most significant and long-running territorial disputes anywhere in the world.
There are hundreds of thousands of Saharawi, many of whom, during a war decades ago, fled to Algeria, where they live in sprawling refugee camps in the desert near the border, desperately wanting to return to their homeland.
That homeland, similar in size to New Zealand, is now split in two. Morocco built a sand wall thousands of kilometres long, flanked on both sides by millions of explosives. The side it manages, called the occupied territories, has 80 per cent of the land, all of the sea, and all of the phosphate. The eastern side, the liberated territories, has nothing.
More than a dozen international human rights groups have condemned the Moroccan Government, which they say is brutally occupying a territory it has no right to.
The ugliness of the situation has led to a backlash against those trading in the region. Some investment funds and banks have blacklisted those who trade there, and many companies dropped their imports.
First the Australian companies stopped, then the American ones. Earlier this year, the Canadian fertiliser giant that was by far the largest phosphate trader said it would stop by the end of this year.
A decade ago, New Zealand was the fourth-largest importer. Then it became the third largest, then the second.
As of next year, only three companies in the world are known to be actively in the market for Western Saharan phosphate. One is an India-based subsidiary of the mine’s operator, the Moroccan stateowned Office Cherifien des Phosphates (OCP), which is effectively selling the phosphate to itself.
It leaves two independent buyers: Ballance Agri-Nutrients and Ravensdown, the New Zealand farmer co-operatives that supply 98 per cent of New Zealand’s fertiliser.
If you are a farmer in New Zealand and you use Superphosphate fertiliser, it is likely the raw materials came from the western side of the world’s longest minefield, and made the long, slow journey to the sea on the world’s longest conveyor belt.
When it arrives in New Zealand, records will say the phosphate came from Morocco, but the many thousands of people in Algerian refugee camps would say it was stolen from them.
‘‘New Zealand farmers are the only clients in the whole world of the Moroccan plunder of Western Sahara,’’ says Erik Hagen of Western Saharan Resource Watch, an NGO that monitors trade from the region.
‘‘New Zealand stands alone now as the main funder of the