This month a delegation of Moroccan nationals representing the African company OCP Group and its co-operative subsidiary Phosbourcraa took the chance to highlight how, despite supplying 70% of the phosphate rock used in NZ, the trade is by no means one-way.
Both Ravensdown and Ballance use the company’s mine in the disputed Western Sahara region to supply about 70% of their phosphate rock needs.
The low-cadmium, high-phosphate rock is mixed with phosphate rock sourced from other countries, including China.
For Otmane Bennani-Smires, OCP executive vice-president of legal affairs, the visit to NZ is more than just business.
The journey from Auckland to Tauranga was a cause for pride among the delegation, with green paddocks and crops a celebration of the role their company has played in providing a key mineral for this country’s food production.
The company’s Khouribga phosphate mine is an hour from Casablanca in a region with about 70% of the world’s known phosphate reserves. Itprocesses about 44 million tonnes a year.
The relationship with NZ’s two main fertiliser companies extends back 30 years, with this country among OCP Group’s top customers for the rock.
With expectations the reserve has at least another 80 years available, the company is keen – despite recent publicity about the disputed territory – to continue its relationship.
It is one increasingly starting to foster benefits over and above the simple sale of bulk phosphate for growing crops.
A key mine subsidiary, Phosbourcraa, is playing a role in helping reciprocate benefits between the company and NZ.
After OCP bought the original Spanish owners out completely in 2002, the operation was set up as a co-operative operation with a broad community focus aimed at lifting the quality of life of the people directly employed in the mine and the communities it supports.
“When we took over the operation from the Spanish there were only about 4% locals employed. Today we have 76% employed, across all levels of staff and management,” Phosbourcraa Foundation vice-president Hajbouha Zoubeir said.
The foundation exercises the Phosbourcraa vision to enrich the local community and runs with key pillars – agriculture, social advances, entrepreneurship, urban development and cultural-sporting encouragement.
The agricultural programme now has strong links with agronomists from both Massey and Lincoln Universities, working with the co-op on its 400ha development farm identifying species capable of thriving in high salinity ground water conditions. Four Moroccan agronomy PhD students are attending Lincoln.
“We have discovered 19 species of crop that can tolerate those conditions. This includes quinoa, where production in high salinity conditions is actually above the national average,” Zoubeir said.
So far extension work has trained almost 2000 farmers over four years on better crop management, camel breeding and improved water efficiency.
A desalinisation plant also provides two million cubic metres of water to the local community alongside a school and research lab.
Almost 30,000 people are benefiting from the foundation’s health and surgery services and 13,000 are children educated through funded schools.
Zoubeir said women have been a key focus of the foundation’s development projects, with 60% of the foundation’s beneficiaries female.
That is in a country that regards itself as an increasingly matriarchal society, with more women starting businesses, leading in academic studies and heading up political parties.
“We are particularly focused on getting more women engaged in agriculture, for example, learning to grow quinoa and hopefully for it to be at least as significant as cous cous is now,” Zoubeir said.
NZ’s history of phosphate extraction is not the most enlightened, with Nauru an example of mining’s worst-case footprint on a finite resource.
But Bennani-Smires said sustainability on an environmental and social level is paramount, with the company investing heavily in smarter water use in an extremely dry climate, desalinisation technology and sourcing 98% of its energy through wind farms.
“The United Nations has an expectation that a population cannot be denied the right to development, jobs and health care.
“So there is a legal framework there and we believe we are well above that standard, doing it in a sustainable way,” he said.
