Phosphate mining in distant places: The dark side of New Zealand's agricultural economic success

Since colonisation, New Zealand has developed its wealth from a reliance on pastoral farming as the backbone of its agricultural economy. New Zealand farmers enjoyed eight decades of cheap phosphate due to their structural imperialism and exploitation of their Pacific neighbours, namely the islands of Nauru and Banaba (Ocean Island). Bootstrapping a landscape with limited natural fertility into a major global food supplier has a hidden environmental and social cost, in the form of phosphate extraction and the devastating impact of that extraction, initially on Indigenous Pacific neighbours and, for the past three decades, the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara annexed by Morocco. We argue that this position continues to prioritise the strategic supply of phosphate over Indigenous land and human rights. We explore the nexus of extractive industry resource exploitation as part of the global commodity production expansion where it meets Indigenous groups living in resource-rich areas. The juxtaposition of Indigenous human rights against the ongoing development and expansion of global industrial agricultural practices in the face of increasing global demand for food has shifted from geopolitical manoeuvrings by neo-colonial countries to agri-industrial entities underpinning agricultural economies.