ABSTRACT
The old colonial territory of Spanish Sahara, on the west coast of Africa, was regarded as a largely empty desert, the size of Britain but with less than 100,000 people , many of them nomadic. Then, in the early 1970s, huge deposits of rock phosphate, a key constituent of fertilisers, were found at Bukraa in the north of the territory, quite close to the borders with Morocco, itself the world's biggest supplier of phosphates.
