The Sardine, or the Blind Spot of Fishery Neocolonialism in Morocco and Western Sahara

SOLIDMAR, 29/1/2026

Morocco provides the sea, Western Sahara provides the resource, Europe captures the value — and international law remains dockside

A revealing paradox of contemporary globalization: while the sardine is one of the most consumed fish in the world, its journey remains largely invisible. In Morocco — the world's leading exporter of canned sardines — this invisibility is anything but neutral. It conceals a chain of exploitation where overexploitation of resources, circumvention of international law, and capture of value for the benefit of external markets, particularly European ones, intersect. Western Sahara is its silent epicenter.

A revealing economic decision: halting exports of frozen sardines

Effective February 1, 2026, Morocco has decided to suspend exports of frozen sardines (which represent at most 10% of exported sardines), officially to protect domestic market supply and contain soaring prices. This decision, presented as technical and circumstantial, is in reality the symptom of a deeper crisis.

Sardine catches have declined sharply in recent years, due to the combined effects of industrial pressure, climate variability, and stock overexploitation. Yet, the sardine is not only an export product: it constitutes a staple protein for Morocco's popular classes. Therefore, the halt in frozen exports aims to arbitrate, belatedly, between the global market and national food security.

But this measure does not touch the heart of the system: exports of canned sardines, exceeding 150,000 tons per year, continue. In other words, the sardine continues to leave the country en masse, as long as it is processed and value-added for export. The hierarchy is clear: the global market takes precedence, as long as the added value is enough.

Western Sahara: fisheries heartland, lawless zone

This contradiction is explained by a central fact: the majority of Morocco's industrial sardines are caught in the waters adjacent to Western Sahara. El Aayun and Dakhla have become, in two decades, major fishing hubs, concentrating catches, freezing units, canneries, and fishmeal factories.

Yet, Western Sahara remains a non-self-governing territory under international law, whose people have never exercised their right to self-determination. Legally, its natural resources — both terrestrial and maritime — cannot be exploited without the free and informed consent of the Sahrawi people. This consent has never been obtained.

It is precisely on this point that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled on multiple occasions. By invalidating the application of EU-Morocco fisheries and agricultural agreements to Western Sahara, the Court has recalled a simple principle: Western Sahara is not Morocco. Consequently, the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement, whose latest protocol expired in July 2023, is now de facto suspended and legally weakened.

Faced with this situation, the EU has decided to relaunch the file:

• In November 2025, the European Commission submitted a negotiation mandate to EU member states to begin new discussions with Morocco for a new fisheries agreement.
• In January 2026, ambassadors of the member states gave their green light to the Commission to officially open these negotiations with Rabat.
• The first technical negotiations are scheduled to begin in February 2026 in Rabat, with the aim of reaching an agreement in principle by the third quarter of 2026.

The new agreement under discussion aims to integrate reinforced requirements regarding sustainability, control, and compliance with European jurisprudence (notably on Western Sahara). There is within the EU a certain tension between states favorable to a quick agreement (Spain, Portugal — the hardest hit by the suspension of the agreements) and more reserved states (Ireland, Nordic countries).

European fleets have left the area. But the fish itself continues to reach European markets — processed in Morocco, labeled as Moroccan, integrated into commercial chains without mention of its real origin. The law is formally respected, materially circumvented.

Fisheriy neocolonialism: flagless domination

It is here that the sardine becomes a political object. The Moroccan fisheries system — and even more so the Sahrawi one — pertains to a neocolonialism without direct colonial administration, but based on perfectly rehearsed economic mechanisms.

The resource is local, the labor is local, the ecological impacts are local. But the brands are foreign, prices are set on international markets, the final added value is captured outside the territory, strategic decisions escape the concerned populations.

The canneries of southern Morocco and Western Sahara, often legally Moroccan, function as subordinate links in value chains dominated by Europe. They produce for invisible brands, international distributors, private labels. Industrialization exists, but without economic sovereignty.

The “development” narrative masks a harsher reality: it is an extractive industrialization, where employment barely compensates for dispossession, and where the resource's exhaustion is preparing a mid-term social and ecological crisis.

A crisis revealing an exhausted model

The halt in frozen sardine exports, the suspension of the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement, the resource scarcity: everything converges towards the same observation, namely, the current fisheries model is unsustainable.

It is ecologically unsustainable because it relies on excessive pressure on stocks. It is socially unsustainable because it pits local populations against global markets. It is legally unsustainable because it relies on a contested exploitation of a non-self-governing territory. It is politically unsustainable because it prolongs a colonial logic under the guise of international trade.

The sardine as a political revealer

The sardine is not a detail. It is a revealer. A revealer of a globalized economy capable of circumventing the law while claiming it.
A revealer of a North-South relationship still structured by extraction and dependence. A revealer, finally, of the impasse of a development that ignores the sovereignty of peoples over their resources.

As long as the sardine from Western Sahara can be fished without consent, processed without transparency, and consumed without question, fisheries neocolonialism will not only remain possible, but profitable.

And that is precisely why it deserves to be named.