Rabat – While Morocco is connected to Europe through its Mediterranean coastline, the country’s Atlantic coast is its “gateway to Africa and the Americas,” King Mohammed VI said on Monday while delivering a speech on the occasion of the 48th anniversary of the Green March.
During the speech, the King said that Morocco “has continued to press ahead with our development and modernization policies, in order to serve our citizens and make the best use of the assets abounding in the country, especially in the Moroccan Sahara.”
The monarch stressed the need to “rehabilitate” the national coastline, “including the part in the Moroccan Sahara region bordering the Atlantic, and re-engineer this geopolitical space at the African level,” with the goal of transforming the Atlantic region into a space for human interaction and economic integration that plays a key role continentally and internationally.
He further explained that rehabilitating the Atlantic coastline would “facilitate connectivity between the different countries bordering the Atlantic, provide for means of transportation, build logistics platforms, and consider the development of a strong, competitive national commercial marine fleet.”
Boosting infrastructure across the Atlantic coastline “should be an integrated economy based on the development of exploration for offshore natural resources and the promotion of investment in marine fishing,” the King added, also mentioning seawater desalination to encourage agricultural activities and supporting renewable energy as important aspects of the development.
To this end, King Mohammed VI called for the adoption of a strategy to promote tourism across the Atlantic coastline. The strategy should make use of the region’s assets to turn it into a “prime destination for beach and Saharan tourism.”
In recent years, Morocco has invested heavily in infrastructure projects in its Southern Regions.
The new Dakhla Atlantic port, a $3.3 billion project, and the Tiznit-Dakhla highway are the crown jewels of Morocco’s socio-economic development strategy for the southern provinces as they are expected to contribute to the development of African as well as regional trade.
In 2022, King Mohammed VI revealed that Morocco was funding massive developmental projects in its southern provinces with a budget cover of more than MAD 77 billion ($7.1 billion).
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