Large-scale oil and gas extraction in Algeria, phosphate mining; water-intensive agribusiness and mass tourism in Morocco and Tunisia, are all aspects of an extractivist model of development that is accompanied by disastrous social and environmental consequences, affecting the most marginalised sections in society.
Extractivism refers to activities that over-exploit natural resources destined particularly for export to world markets. As such, it is not limited to minerals and oil: it extends to productive activities which overexploit land, water and biodiversity, such as agribusiness, intensive forestry, industrial fish farming and mass tourism. According to a new research titled “Extractivism and Resistance in North Africa” for the Transnational Institute, extractivism is largely incompatible with social justice and plays an important role in the ecological crisis in North Africa. It creates what Naomi Klein calls ‘sacrifice zones’, areas disproportionately ravaged by extraction and processing, inhabited by people whose bodies, health, land and water are sacrificed in order to maintain the accumulation of capital.
The various cases against the extractive sector in Algeria (Ain Salah and Ouargla), Morocco (Khouribga, Safi and Imider) and Tunisia (Kerkennah, Gafsa and Gabes), exemplify broader patterns of primitive accumulation in the global South, taking the brutal form of the extraction and pillage of natural resources, and the degradation of environments and ecosystems through the privatisation and commodification of land and water. This has intensified in recent decades, following the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the infiltration of transnational capital, including the extractive type.
