OR Africa is falling down on my head
The bulk phosphate carrier docked at the Port of Lyttelton pours streams of phosphate through the hoppers into the trucks waiting below. The trucks then head off to the fertiliser factory some 25km away.
The top-dressing plane taxis up the airstrip at Port Levy to fill up with another load of fertiliser.
At this spring time of year, hill farmers in New Zealand hope for fine weather not just for the sake of the survival of new-born lambs and calves, but so that conditions are good for the aerial application of fertiliser. As I worked in my vege garden on Monday, digging over the ground and fertilising it with crushed sheep dags, the drone of the top-dressing plane returning to the airstrip high on the hill in the next valley was an almost constant sound, recurring every ten minutes or so. When I hear that sound, my mind goes to Africa, the source of most of what is in the fine powder that the plane drops over the hills around me, and I think - 'Africa is falling down on my head.'
The links between the mining of the phosphate that is in the fertiliser and its application in New Zealand are long, and they are not pretty. Most of the phosphate used in fertilisers manufactured in New Zealand today comes from Western Sahara, a country which was illegally occupied by Morocco in 1975. In contravention of a United Nations ruling, Moroccan interests are both exporting and profiting from the Western Saharan phosphate resource (and fish as well, as Gordon Campbell documented in 2008). The New Zealand companies which manufacture the phosphate into superphosphate fertiliser (the stuff falling on my head) have close relations with the Moroccan companies which mine it, and they (and, sadly and inaccurately, the NZ Encyclopaedia on line Te Ara) say that the phosphate comes from 'Morocco'.
It does not. It is mined in Western Sahara and exported from the port of Laayoune, the port of what used to be the capital of Western Sahara before it was annexed by Morocco. Desperate Saharawis even try and leave their country by stowing away on phosphate ships bound for Australia, as Professor Klaus Neumann documents in his paper on seeking asylum in Australia. With this really sad back story the stuff arrives on the other side of the world, where I can photograph a spill of it being scooped up at the port of Lyttelton, or the plane about to drop it over my home.
That (in brief - I have not given any details on how bad life is for many Saharawis today, penned into refugee camps in the Algerian desert and kept out of their homeland by a wall every bit as bad as the one keeping Palestinians from their former homes in Israel) is the awful political side of the story. The environmental side is also rather unhappy. But I'll leave that for another day.
A phosphate spill is cleaned off the dock at Lyttelton. Some of it will have gone into the harbour, adding to existing pollution and nutrient overload.
