This book argues that the demand for ‘clean’ phosphates is turning Western Sahara into a colony

In 1987, when she was twenty, Aminatou Haidar organised a demonstration in advance of an official United Nations visit to the Western Sahara. “We wanted to transmit a clear message to the UN that we wanted independence,” Haidar told me, “Morocco underwent a huge campaign of arrests that targeted both sexes. Women and men, old and young – nobody was spared. They started by arresting over five hundred people.”

One night, three or four days before the UN was slated to arrive, the Moroccans came to Haidar’s house. “I was arrested,” she said. “They put me in a car, and they started to quickly drive around the street.” She was taken to a police barracks near her home. The car circled the streets of Laayoune to give Haidar the impression that they had travelled farther than they had. She was worried that she, like some of her relatives, had been taken to a secret jail inside Morocco, and she feared she would never return.

For most of Haidar’s imprisonment, her family didn’t know where she was. She had been disappeared by the Moroccans. (Under international humanitarian law, enforced disappearances are considered crimes against humanity.) She was held in solitary confinement for a year. “When it was very cold, it was freezing; on the ground, where I was lying, we had no covers,” she told me. “In the first year, I contracted rheumatism because I was thrown into a corridor where it was really cold. And in the summer, it was boiling.” Some of her fellow prisoners were bitten by dogs set on them by policemen.

“We didn’t know if we would be able to leave from this hell,” she said. She thought she would be locked up forever. “Our faith in God helped us through. And we were also determined, because we were convinced that we had all the justice of our cause and international law on our side. We were convinced that the Sahara is not Moroccan and that tomorrow or after tomorrow, it will gain its independence.”

In 1991, Haidar was released into an atmosphere of new hope for the region. Morocco and the Polisario Front had agreed to stop fighting and to hold their referendum. But, as earlier noted, through the 1990s, the promised referendum never arrived. In the early 2000s, James Baker, the former secretary of state who was then the UN secretary-general’s personal envoy for the Western Sahara, probably got closest to negotiating a long-awaited deal, but Morocco’s king managed to scupper it. “Mr Baker’s proposals endanger the very founding principles of the Kingdom,” Mohammed wrote in a letter to President George W Bush, raising the threat of the “redeployment of terrorist groups in the region.” In the margin of his copy of the king’s letter, now at the Princeton University library, Baker wrote: “WRONG!”

Morocco sought to control the narrative after that point. Plans for a referendum were continuously delayed and undermined. When journalists attempted to report on the Western Sahara, they were followed, harassed, and removed. In the late spring of 2017, I tried to visit Laayoune, the capital of the territory. I was stopped before getting off a Royal Air Maroc flight and then sent to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. By chance, Haidar, who had become an internationally renowned activist after her imprisonment, was also travelling to Las Palmas, where she would attend a conference; she told me about her long history of activism, all her hunger strikes and protests to bring awareness to the plight of the Sahrawi. “I have lived the suffering in my own flesh,” she said.

In December 2020, as hostilities flared up between Morocco and the Polisario Front, President Trump announced recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara through a tweet (“Morocco’s serious, credible, and realistic autonomy proposal is the ONLY basis for a just and lasting solution for enduring peace and prosperity!”). The United States set up a consulate in Dakhla, but it stopped short of actually recognising Moroccan sovereignty. Since then, both sides have fi red heavy weapons over the Berm and used drones to attack each other’s positions. (The Bou Craa phosphate mine has not been affected.) The problem of the Western Sahara, Baker said, “has not been handled well, and that’s why it continues to persist.”

The supply chain issues surrounding both a territory that is quite literally at war and a commodity whose very existence the world relies upon to feed itself should be concerning. But nobody seemed to be considering it, neither among State Department officials I interviewed in 2022 and 2023, nor at battery conferences in Michigan and Stuttgart. No one professed to have considered supply chain constraints on phosphates.

One of the arguments in favour of adopting LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries is that the materials needed to make them are much easier to access than nickel and cobalt. Iron, after all, is abundant. “We’re definitely not going to run out of iron. There’s so much iron it’s insane,” Mujeeb Ijaz, the US EV start- up Our Next Energy founder, told the Financial Times in March 2023.

Only a few people had concerns about a phosphate supply crunch. On a 2021 investor call held by Mosaic, one of the largest producers of phosphate fertiliser in the world, company officials noted that three hundred thousand tons of purified phosphoric acid had been redeployed from use in fertilizer production to use in the making of LFP batteries. That year, India’s stock of phosphates plummeted by around a third. Farmers committed suicide because they could not secure enough phosphate for their fields. “It’s going to become a battle, and let’s face it, fertiliser manufacturing isn’t exactly sexy,” one of Mosaic’s officials said. “Lithium is.”

Awareness of the limited supply of phosphates only really began to hit home in 2023. “LFP batteries also contain phosphorus, which is used in food production,” a report from the International Energy Agency said that year. “If all batteries today were LFP, they would account for nearly 1% of current agricultural phosphorus use by mass, suggesting that conflicting demands for phosphorus may arise in the future as battery demand increases.”

By 2024, the auto industry was using 5% of the world’s purified phosphoric acid; Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a consulting firm that tracks minerals used in batteries, predicted that this figure would increase to 24% by 2030. Morocco, on the other hand, had become a key piece of the Chinese electric- vehicle supply chain – Chinese firms used the “Made in Morocco” designation to circumvent US tariffs on goods made in China. In 2024, Morocco announced plans to electrify 60% of its vehicle production over the next half-decade.

As for LFP, it was on the rise everywhere. Jose W Fernandez, the Biden administration’s undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, told me that “LFP battery chemistries are expected to comprise a forty- two percent share of cell demand by 2030. … Phosphate refining is expected to be a bottleneck in the future, as only three per cent of total phosphate product supply is currently suitable for lithium-ion battery applications, given the refinement qualifications.”

And, of course, most of that phosphate was refi ned in one place: China.

Excerpted with permission from The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, Nicolas Niarchos, William Collins.