ardine landings rose 66% over the first eight months of the year, reaching close to 394,200 tonnes against 237,800 tonnes a year earlier, the State Secretariat for Maritime Fisheries announced in a statement. Value followed the same slope, climbing from 735.1 million to 1.22 billion dirhams. Carried by that surge in small pelagics and, more broadly, by the recovery of coastal fishing, national fisheries output stands at 786,000 tonnes at the end of August for 12.5 billion dirhams, up 6% in volume and 4% in value on the same period of 2025.
The department reads this as a favorable signal for supplying the domestic market and for feeding the processing and value-adding plants, while recalling that steady deliveries and the preservation of quality remain the conditions for the whole value chain to benefit. The year would have been one of several biological rest periods, regulatory measures taken on the strength of the scientific monitoring of the National Institute for Fisheries Research; these tonnages are what the effort spent on the resource has finally returned. Small pelagics are at once the raw material of the kingdom’s canneries and the cheapest fish on the stall: their scarcity is paid for at the market long before it is read in the statistics, and their return will be read there the same way.
Photo: Daniel*D, CC BY-SA 3.0.
