This strait allows in particular the export of oil from the Middle East to Europe and America. It is estimated that 30 % of maritime oil traffic takes the Mozambique canal, more than 5,000 ships per year.
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Funds that sharpen appetites
The Mozambique canal is not, far from it, that a place of passage. It sharpens as well appetites with regard to its fishery reserves, as well as its extraordinary wealth in minerals and hydrocarbons.
For several years, geological studies have been agreeing on the potential of its seabed. Offshore deposits were discovered between 2010 and 2013 off Mozambique. The reserves are estimated at more than 500 billion cubic meters of gas and between 6 billion and 12 billion barrels of oil. The total French group has already invested billions of dollars in a gas project off the Mozambican coast. A project upset since 2017 and the emergence of a structured social challenge around a Salafist Islamist movement (Ahl Al-Sunnah wa al Jamma’ah-Aswj) which made allegiance in the Islamic State, mainly in the north of the country, in the province of Cabo Delgado, on the coast of the Mozambique Canal.
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Drugs and jihadism
The jihadists forced the French company to go by for very long months its projects which it hopes to resume at the end of the year. French reluctance and the precipitous departure of its workers in conditions of extreme dangerousness have brought a hard blow to the potential development of the region. Several majors who had mentioned investments along the canal preferred not to embark on the region. The Lloyds insurance company appointed, in April 2021, the Mozambique Canal as a “high risk zone”.
This huge strait is also a real motorway for drug traffickers. Some experts even evoke a “Hashish Highway” which has pushed Mozambican jihadists, reinforced by fighters from other countries of the East African coast (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia), to take control of small port infrastructures, generally occupied by non-defenseed fishing communities, to develop (hashish and opium) came mainly from Afghanistan and Pakistan. A drug which is then transported by land routes to South Africa where it will embark on ships or planes towards Europe or the United States. Other roads go back to the Mediterranean. A very lucrative business for local warlords, falsely draped in an ideologico-religious fight.
This jihadist development has also pushed France, omnipresent in the region, to “raise awareness of” the European Union of this issue. This is how the EUTM was born, the training mission implemented for the benefit of the Mozambican army.
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