The Saharawi Natural Resource Watch (SNRW) today launched its first report since its establishment earlier this year. The report, titled “Saharawis: Poor People in a Rich Country”, looks at the fisheries in Western Sahara. The report is in its full version only available in Arabic.

However, the group today also released an English summary of the same report (2MB).

The report shed lights on the different aspects, facts and statistics available on the fishing resources in Western Sahara, and the scale of exploitation, plunder and the serious destruction of the ecological system in the Saharawi waters.

The report presents to the reader useful data and information about the nature of the Saharawi fishing wealth, the species targeted by foreign fishing industry, and the large invasion of Moroccan fishermen to the territory, where more than 40 fishermen villages were built in the last two decades, according to the report.

The report calls upon “all States and foreign companies to refrain from importing the Sahrawi products or investing in the occupied Western Sahara as these activities are in violation of the international law and only encourage and feed the colonization”.

It particularly calls on “the members of the European parliament never to vote in favor of the EU-Morocco fishing agreement, as the same grounds that resulted in the cancellation of the previous agreement are still there”.

It estimated that “it is necessary for the United Nations to assume its legal responsibilities towards the protection of the Saharawi resources as it did in similar cases in East Timor and Namibia.”