Seven trucks loaded with octopus were seized by police and port authorities in the southern Moroccan city of Dakhla on 2 April when government officials declared the shipments did not have the necessary authorizations.
According to the Arabic-language daily newspaper Al Massae, the trucks belonged to a well-connected local elected official. The control services of the Regional Delegation of the Ministry of Fisheries coordinated with police and the port in the operation.
Smuggling of illegally-caught octopus has become a growing problem in Morocco. In January, a smaller bust made the news. In that incident, a pattern of the smuggling activity was exposed.
Police arrested a truck driver and seized five metric tons (MT) of octopus on 29 January. The driver had carried the shipment from Mauritania and declared the correct amount of five MT, but the documents for the shipment showed 25 MT. The driver was working for an organized syndicate that launders illegally-fished Moroccan octopus by overstating imports of Mauritanian product using forged documents. The truck drivers then fill out the missing amount (in this case, another 20 MT) with illegally-caught octopus at cold storage facilities in southern Morocco. The final product enters the European Union via Spain.
Octopus prices are high, creating a lucrative incentive for the fraud and for fishermen to catch octopus even during the government-mandated biological rest period, when fishing is banned.
Import prices in Japan for octopus from Morocco declined about 20 percent in April as compared to the same month last year and are now in the JPY 1,200 to JPY 1,350 (USD 10.75 to USD 12.10, EUR 9.64 to EUR 10.85) per kilogram range. The quantity of imports from Morocco have declined by about one-third in recent years, from nearly 60,000 MT in 2013 to under 40,000 MT last year, according to the Nippon Keizai Shimbun.
