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?
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.
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“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 sell- ing 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.
Over the past decade, the country has emerged as a power in the octopus world, thanks not only to Mauritania’s proximity to markets across North Africa and Europe, but also to a special relationship with consumers in Japan, whose fishing expertise propelled Mauritania’s rise among octopus exporters worldwide.
As per Fortune Business Insights, the global seafood market size stood at around $386.73 billion in 2024. According to additional reports, Africa claims less than 5% of this. Yet within that small portion, Mauritania is a giant.
“Fishing now is number one for Mauritania in terms of foreign exchange and employment,” says Isselmou Hmeida, Commercial Director of the Federación Mauritanie des Pêches, the country’s seafood marketing arm.
“Within the industry,” he says, “number one is octopus”.
The country’s rise in octopus fish- ing began around the 1970s, with the Japanese, who were depleting their traditional stock around the island of Hokkaido. They responded by send- ing teams to Africa to teach Japanese harvest techniques to the locals, dropping pots to the ocean floor and trapping octopus much like lobsters.
By the turn of the new century, Mauritania was emerg- ing as an octopus fishery. According to researchers, Assane Dedah Fall and Berchie Asiedu, from 14,000 metric tons in 2006, octopus landings nearly tripled to over 33,000 by 2018. The following year, in 2019, the country’s catch nearly dou- bled, to a record 55,000 tons.
SeaBOS further calculates some 65,000 Mauritanians to- day are actively involved in octopus’ procurement, with an estimated 200,000 more joining the octopus supply chain. Out of a population of just over five million, about one of ev- ery 20 Mauritanians somehow makes a livelihood from the octopus catch.
Yet today, with the world growing hungrier for its catch, Mauritania faces several dilemmas. For one: who should be al- lowed to catch the Octopus vulgaris, and in what quantities? For another: whose needs come first: the fish or the fishermen?
These are not hypothetical concerns. Countries like Mauritania that discover riches just offshore could also find that the temptation to over-produce soon threatens their capacity to produce at all. “For some years now, the octopus fishery has been show- ing signs of depletion as a result of increasing fishing pressure and high levels of exploitation,” Fall and Asiedu concluded in 2024.
“Landings and yields appear to be declining. There are concerns about the sustainability of the octopus stock.”
So, although prices for octopus today are high, an uncertain future looms.
Signs of Mauritania’s decline already can be seen as far away as Japan. “Mauritania is considered number one qual- ity in Japan,” says Eiki Shimizu, CEO of Shimizu Shoten Co. Ltd a fishery product processing business.
“But it’s getting hard to get. More people are demanding more octopus. Prices are going up.” Shimizu says he’s beginning to look for alternatives from South Korea and elsewhere. “Now the supply from Mauritania is changing,” Shimizu tells FORBES AFRICA. “They used to sell us 90% of the catch. Now it’s more like 40%.”
Over-fishing, many claim, has resulted in harvests of smaller-sized fish, which command lower prices from wholesalers. For artisanal fishers, this amounts to a literal race to the bottom as more crews compete for a species that appears to be growing scarcer on West Africa’s coast.
“The majority of the octopus harvested have been smaller in size,” notes Matilde Mereghetti of the London-based industry research publication, Undercurrent News. “This scarcity of larger octopuses has intensified competition among buyers.”
Therein lies Mauritania’s dilemma: how to regulate against overfishing while still allowing Mauritanians a chance to earn a living from the sea.
Mokhtar Ba, for example, runs a company called Kossi Baye Enterprise with 200 fishermen working out of Senegal’s coastal hub of Saint-Louis, which shares land and sea borders with Mauritania. He is a dual citizen of both countries and has his own views on his country’s octopus dilemma. On the one hand, he praises Mauritania for initiating strict harvest rules and for enforcing them. On the other, he recognizes the many ways commercial fisheries can evade those rules. Moreover, Ba says, well over half the workforce hauling seafood along the coast increasingly comes from other African countries, especially Senegal and Nigeria. They are the ones most tempted to flout regulations by fishing in Mauritanian waters but sell- ing their catch elsewhere.
Yet, there are reasons for optimism.
Nicolas Guichoux, Chief Program Officer for the London-based Marine Stewardship Council, has been keeping an eye on Mauritania and holds out hope. “The good news with fishing is that it’s never too late,” he tells FORBES AF- RICA. He points to his organization’s origins, responding in the 1990s to the catastrophic collapse of codfish stocks along the Atlantic’s Grand Banks. What looked like ruin eventually turned to recovery and more sustainable fishing practices. In 2018, Mauritania received funding from a Switzerland-based NGO, the MAVA Foundation, to begin work improving coastal fisheries. The council built what it calls a “pathway project” involving 15 coastal species. Guichoux treats such initiatives as first steps, essentially building technical capacity in advance of an action plan.
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