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This article appears in the February 2014 edition of the Financial Post Magazine. Visit the iTunes store to download the iPad edition of this month’s issue.

LAAYOUNE, WESTERN SAHARA • A lumbering four-storey-high dragline excavator rumbles and clanks as it digs its teeth into the gritty taupe layers of phosphate rock in the pit below. The machine swivels the excavator’s arm to the right, and hoists the dragline’s scoop, now spilling over, towards the sky. Its dusty haul is dumped on a growing pile in the mine, located in the heart of Western Sahara, a territory on the northwest coast of Africa.

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From here, the world’s longest conveyor belt transports the phosphate rock — prized for its phosphorus, a key ingredient in fertilizer — more than 100 kilometres across Western Sahara and offshore to a marine port in the Atlantic Ocean. This phosphate from this isolated region has a global footprint. Shipping vessels then load up with the rock and head to customers in many corners of the globe, including Canadian fertilizer companies PotashCorp of Saskatchewan Inc. and Agrium Inc. Exporting natural resources would be routine business in most places, but in Western Sahara — the last remaining colony in Africa — it is a political landmine, and some argue, against international law.