TENTACLE TEMPTATION

OVER THE PAST DECADE, MAURITANIA HAS EMERGED AS A REGION KNOWN FOR ITS OCTOPUS FISHERY. CAN THIS AFRICAN DESERT COUNTRY, WITH ONLY 0.5% OF ARABLE LAND AND EXTENSIVE MINERAL RESOURCES, CONTINUE TO CASH IN ON ITS COAST?

- By JOEL MILLMAN

ON THE extreme northwest corner of the African continent, two nations famous for their arid terrain-Mauritania and Morocco-are enjoying a high tide, thanks to booming prices for their primary oceanic export: octopus.

After several down years, following the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic, both countries are seeing strong demand for catches of Octopus vulgaris, a species that thrives across a combined 3,000km of Atlantic coastline.

For the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the nation's official name, that zone stretches out along a shallow continental shelf whose temperatures and salinity are among the best on earth for the eight-armed Cephalopod, which belongs to a family of seafood varieties that include squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, and whose market prices also are climbing since last summer.

According to a report from trade publication, Seafood Media, from August 2024, Mauritania's octopus prices have skyrocketed by around $500 per ton since the 2024-2025 season opened, with prices for Morocco only slightly behind.

Merchants like Liman Beirouk of Beirouk Fish Trading, a Mauritanian vendor, are savoring the moment.

"Last summer, during the France Olympics, raw octopus was getting almost €15 [$16.18] per kilo at the dock," he told FORBES AFRICA earlier this month, adding, "we were selling it for twice that amount in Paris".

Those prices have held up throughout the winter, where weeks of stormy weather kept catches low, effectively raising prices for whatever fishing crews managed to bring to shore. So brisk has the demand been, Beirouk says, that it even made sense to ship frozen octopus by truck, a two-day journey from Africa, costing €6,000 ($6,492) per truckload.

Indeed, these are heady times for one of Africa's least developed countries.