Project description
Examining the sustainability paradox in Morocco’s phosphate sector
Holding about 70 % of global phosphate reserves, Morocco is a central player in agricultural supply chains and in the fragile food security they sustain. The state-run OCP Group that manages these reserves claims to be leading a renewable energy transition while investing in new production capacity for fertilisers. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GreenMorPhos project will explore the contradiction between achieving economic expansion and maintaining environmental sustainability. It will examine OCP’s strategy within its global competitive context and map its material and social realities. Furthermore, it will evaluate evolving labour practices, the interaction between industry and local communities, and corporate approaches to managing social conflict.
Objective
The GreenMorPhos project investigates the Moroccan segment of the phosphate industry, which is a cornerstone of the agri-food nexus while raising major ecological, social, and environmental concerns. Morocco holds two-thirds of the world's phosphate rock reserves, and the national company Office chérifien des phosphates (OCP) is a global leader in the sector.
The project focuses on recent developments in the Moroccan industry, which align with the strategic orientations of the Kingdom: its commitment to the energy transition and, to a lesser extent, its expansion efforts across the African continent. By forging an original connection between the Global Production Networks approach and Political Industrial Ecology (the former from economic geography, the latter combining industrial and political ecology), it looks at the paradoxes of an industry striving simultaneously for growth and environmental sustainability.
The research pursues three objectives. First, it aims to understand the strategic thinking behind OCP’s Green Investment Programme and the recent transformations of Morocco's phosphate sector within a highly competitive global environment. Second, it seeks to trace the flows of matter and energy that underpin Morocco’s phosphate sector, along with the associated socio-environmental impacts, in order to identify the contributions and the blind spots of the Green Investment Programme. Thirdly, it aims to analyse the transformations of labour regimes and the evolving relationships between the industry and its territories, as well as the ways in which the company seeks to mitigate social tensions.
To this end, it adopts an integrated methodology that combines field visits, interviews, document analysis, GIS, and flow diagram modelling. This research will offer a substantial contribution to the analysis of the phosphate industry and to critical scholarship on state involvement and greening efforts in natural resource-based industries.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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1211 Geneve
Switzerland
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