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Middle East & North Africa
Devalued Money and Depleted Resources: The Ecological Consequences of Monetary Policy in North Africa
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Noria Research
Corona from Below: Field Notes from Everyday Life in Eastern Cameroon During the Covid-19 Pandemic
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Middle East & North Africa
Hy Hopes: The Goals and Challenges of Oman’s Hydrogen Strategy
Introduction
In October 2025, tens of thousands took to the streets in the Tunisian coastal city of Gabes after the country’s General Labour Union (UGTT) called for a general strike to protest what locals have called an “environmental assassination”. The crisis was triggered by the pollution produced by the city’s giant phosphate complex. Once celebrated as a symbol of Tunisia’s industrial modernity, the complex is today condemned for polluting the region’s air, plants and water, and for driving a sharp increase of cancer and respiratory diseases rates. In the weeks preceding the protest, more than 200 people in Gabes were hospitalized for respiratory conditions due to the plant’s emissions of phosphogypsum and gas residues. “Even Gabes’s pomegranates now taste like smoke”, said a local resident describing the situation in the city.[1]
These types of localized environmental and health harms proliferate not only across North Africa but the whole of the global south. Take for example the cement industry in Egypt. Residents of Wadi al-Qamar neighborhood in Alexandria have for years been exposed to the toxic emissions produced by the Titan Cement factory located meters from their homes. This led many residents to suffer from chronic respiratory illnesses. After years of filing complaints to official environmental authorities yielded no results, victims had no choice but to seek redress in the courts. Hearings on their case began nearly a decade ago. Just recently, they did win compensation for the health damages caused by the plant’s pollution. Alas, the victory was more exception than rule, testifying to the severity of the environmental harm rather than to the judicial system’s general willingness to protect the victims of industrial excess. And despite the court ruling (which Titan Cement initially appealed), the company continued to drag its feet in making the payments owed.[2]
All this proceeds against a backdrop begging questions as to the actual objectives of the global north’s greening agenda. Recent investments made by multilateral lenders in North Africa point to a significant misalignment between the north’s goals and the south’s needs. This is exemplified by a recent IFC-issued credit line for solar-powered phosphate projects in Morocco[3] and the EBRD’s backing of hydrogen-based cement upgrades in Egypt.[4] Focused solely on carbon metrics, both financial arrangements seek only to replace fossil energy with renewables during the respective production processes. As such, the loans do not address the other ecological harms associated with phosphate and cement production–e.g. water pollution and depletion, air pollution, ecosystem damage. They also do nothing to alter the fundamental character of the relation binding the economies of Europe to those of North Africa. Today as in the past, this is a relation premised on extraction and unequal exchange. Europe’s near-shoring of much of its heavy industry to the southern shores of the Mediterranean testifies as much. Done with an eye on supply chain security and cleaning up the homeland, near-shoring is leading to a substantive transfer of ecological damage to countries like Egypt, who, desperate as ever for hard currency, have stepped in as key partners in this European initiative. The surge of high polluting, energy-intensive exports presently departing Egyptian ports for Europe, in fact, has been large enough to even gain notice at Reuters. As the news agency reported a few months back, “the higher (industrial) output in Egypt has emerged just as production of the same commodities has decreased in Europe, and highlights a growing trend in the re-shoring of smokestack sectors away from high energy-cost locations and areas with pollution controls”.
If markets, classes and nations are bound in dialectical unity, what governs this unity in the era of the green transition? Surveying evidence gathered in the Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input–Output (EEMRIO) database, we will propose that the green transition is being governed by forms of exchange more environmentally destructive to the global south than those practiced in colonial times: In the colonial period, after all, extremely polluting industries–such as coal mining, steel and textiles–were still concentrated in the global north.
We put forth this proposition in view of differentials both in the ecological intensity of exports and currency valuations. Adopting a per-monetary-unit approach rather than a total volume of resource transfer approach–the latter being favored by most scholars working on ecologically unequal exchange[5]–our research offers a precise determination of the ecological losses embedded in each unit of commercial exchange. It also clarifies the extent to which discrepancies in currency values mediate the spread of ecological loss.
Unequal Exchange in the Modern Day: Monetary Dynamics and the Distribution of Ecological Pain
One of the organizing principles of global capitalism and as such, of the green transition, is unequal exchange. Playing an essential role here is the hierarchy of national currencies. By dint of this hierarchy’s discriminatory logic, countries in the global south, inclusive of North Africa, are today absorbing, and systematically so, disproportionate ecological burdens in engaging in international trade.
For the likes of Egypt and Tunisia in particular, monetary dynamics have weighed on proceedings as follows. Under the pressure of financial markets and the guidance of international financial institutions (IFIs), policymakers and capitals have persistently sought external competitiveness through a familiar two-step: undervaluing local currencies and leveraging comparative advantages in the production of low-price and resource-intensive commodities. Abiding by the terms of classical trade theory promoting specialization and an International Division of Labour (IDL), this is a strategy meant to resolve structural trade deficits. In reality, however, it has begotten resource depletion and ecological degradation while doing little to alleviate recurring strains on the current account. Effects on resource depletion and ecological degradation derive in part from currency devaluation: Devaluation makes it more attractive for foreign and local capitals to develop polluting and resource-intensive production in devalued economies. To understand why, consider that with the currency weakened, the relative costs of investment and labor compensation is cheapened just as the competitiveness of outputs on international markets for commodities and simple manufactures is heightened.
However, the weakening of the currency also has the effect of raising the price of imports. Moreover, with time, the terms of trade (TOT) and real (i.e. accounting for inflation) and sometimes nominal exchange value of the commodities being produced tends to decline. This is due to a handful of structural properties baked into the international trade system–specifically, oversupply, extreme competitiveness for lower value-added goods and services, and differences in the price and income elasticity of demand for non-essential capital-intensive versus essential resource-intensive goods and services. Hence, the strategy being adopted tends not to ease trade deficits just as it requires that more land, water, and energy be extracted to maintain the same levels of hard currency revenues.
Nor is this the only way that currency dynamics facilitate unequal exchange. Also factoring is the spatial relativity of currency value. This can be observed through mapping the geographic unevenness of a currency’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Specifically, it is almost always the case that the purchasing power of currency issued by a high income country (HIC) will be far greater when spent within a lower middle income country (LMIC) rather than at home. Substantively, this value disparity constitutes a subsidy for HIC firms operating abroad–and presents obvious opportunities for arbitrage. For LMICs, contrarily, the disparity creates a ‘distortion factor’ which serves to systemically suppress domestic wages and commodity prices, as Josef Köhler has documented.[6]
And also pushing in that same direction of wage and commodity price repression, of course, is the very structure of global value chains (GVCs). With few exceptions, GVCs evince monopolies and monopsonistic properties on the buyer side. A handful of firms from the global north hoard intellectual property and with it, a claim to the lion’s share of value generated in the production process. Through branding and marketing power, these same firms also control access to final consumers. The latter especially weighs on the producers of primary goods such as Egypt and Tunisia. Its effects are visible in the staggering differentials separating the price that an exporter receives for its product and the one consumers pay for that product at the retail level in the importing country. For a sense of scale, the example of Egyptian oranges may be instructive: In some instances, the price received by the Egyptian exporter of an orange has been reported as being as low as 10% of the retail price in the importing country.[7] Materially, this means that the capital accumulated through the sale of an orange is almost entirely captured in the importing country, split between a coterie of importers, transporters, retailers and governments (via value-added taxes in the latter case). It also means the Egyptian exporter must increase the volume of his/her sales and with it, the ecological footprint of production, in order to grasp at profitability.
Undervaluing the environment
Beyond the orange example, the empirics demonstrate quite clearly how unequal exchange more generally taxes the ecologies of North Africa. In the first instance, one sees that a sizable portion of the region’s total exports are made up of commodities characterised by high ecological intensity and low value such as crops, cement, phosphates, and textiles. With an export basket biased in this manner, commercial exchange engenders enormous ecological losses. Evaluated in terms of water-dollar terms, North Africa’s average monetary return on freshwater use is about $10 per cubic meter. This figure is consistent with the average yields observed in middle income countries. Contrarily, high income countries (HIC) earn on average $57 for every cubic meter of water withdrawn.[8] And cavernous though this gap is, it does not tell the full story: Egypt’s agricultural exports have a return of about $0.5 for every cubic metre of water used, less than 1% of the average monetary return on water in HICs .[9]
THE ECOLOGICAL RAVAGES OF TRADE
As mentioned, North Africa’s main export sectors include fertilizers, cement, textiles, and vegetable oils. Each produces environmental burdens per unit of export value dozens of times higher than the export industries of HICs. This is evinced quite starkly in Table 1. As it displays, every €1 million of phosphate fertilizer exported from North Africa generates 40 times more freshwater toxicity compared to average HIC exports. Textile exports from North Africa produce 15 times more freshwater pollution per €1 million than the HIC average, while the yield for cement exports is ten times greater. The acidification and eutrophication caused by North Africa’s cement exports, moreover, is about 500 times higher than average HIC exports. Critically, even industries perceived as ‘low-impact’, such as vegetable oils, emit nearly 20 times more freshwater toxins and far greater terrestrial pollutants than their high-income counterparts.
| Non-emission environmental impacts of select North African exports (2021) | ||||
| Industry | Freshwater Ecotoxicity (CTUe) by EUR mil | Terrestrial Ecotoxicity (kg 1,4-DCB eq.) by EUR mil | Ecosystem Damage (PAF m³·day) by EUR mil | Acidification/Eutrophication (PAF m³·day) |
| Phosphate Fertilizer | 9420.556172 | 340.264321943 | 8652.06155836 | 15919.637462 |
| Cement | 2358.10345499 | 122.578921681 | 1802.51628605 | 372334.191945 |
| Vegetable Oils | 4198.012448 | 89.4324282171 | 1109.13905538 | 4058.43148439 |
| Textiles | 3584.702279 | 138.411084561 | 1576.88363697 | 21483.7624318 |
| Average HIC | 229.5021281 | 15.56492202 | 92.86115602 | 742.6295464 |
| Source: EXIOBASE 3 EEMRIO data. Average HIC based on author calculation. Methodology for calculating average HIC import impact can be found here: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6997348/v2 | ||||
Homing in on the Monetary Domain
Per our thesis, the empirics also affirm that these differentials in the pollution generated through trade are highly impacted by differentials in currency values. This is most easily tracked across Egypt’s contemporary history.
With the International Monetary Fund serving as the handmaiden of devaluation, between 2016 and 2024, the Egyptian pound fell from an exchange value of EGP 7 to EGP 50 per USD. As would have been anticipated by Fund economists, the currency’s weakening did boost export volumes for agricultural goods, which became relatively cheaper for importers largely based in Europe and the Gulf.[10] However, growth in volume came at enormous cost: With the per unit hard currency revenues being generated through agricultural exports falling lower due to the EGP’s descent, export volumes needed to be significantly scaled to derive the same pre-devaluation dollar yield.
To see the moving parts, let’s return to oranges. First consider that the average export price per ton of Egyptian oranges for the years preceding the 2016 devaluation (2008–2016) was $513 per ton, compared to $473 per ton for the post-devaluation period (2017–2023).[11] And things got much worse thereafter: In 2024, the price per ton reached $150, despite the dollar itself shedding exchange value last year. Moreover, with the dollar’s own purchasing power declining markedly for more than a decade–a dollar today only fetches about 70% of what it did in 2012–the real return generated by orange exports is even less than these distressing numbers suggest. If the likes of Egyptian oranges managed to capture an unprecedented share of the European market last year, then, it was only because the export price had collapsed to an unsustainable $0.15 per kilogram.[12]
Ecologically, the consequence of intensifying extraction to cancel out the effects of currency loss were substantial. After all, citrus cultivation is among the most water-intensive agricultural activities, and Egypt is already a profoundly water-stressed country. In growing more oranges just to sell them for a pittance, Egypt ended up earning 100 times less on every 1000 litres of water embedded in its agricultural exports (about $0.5[13]) than high-income countries earn on an average export. Leaving aside costs in terms of energy, labour, associated environmental degradation, the trade can only be conceived as a dreadful loser.
Nor is the case of Egypt exceptional within North Africa. This monetary-ecological dynamic is well at work in Tunisia, too. The depreciation of Tunisia’s dinar which commenced in the mid-2010s has not only been followed by worsening trade deficits[14]: it has coincided with the increased exports and declining hard currency yields (on a per unit basis) for resource intensive commodities such as olive oil.[15] The last fifteen months have been especially bad in this regard, with the prices fetched by olive oil producers tanking by huge margins. As this has come during a time of long term drought in the Maghreb region and Southern Europe, Tunisia’s redoubling of olive cultivation has required the deployment of waters sourced from scarce groundwater.[16] The long-term ecological effects of this are certain to be pronounced.
Zooming out, it bears mentioning that agricultural commodity prices have been on a downslope since 2011[17], a period when many LMICs experienced currency devaluations as part of IMF structural adjustment programmes.[18]
Towards a just ecological revaluation
With global carbon emissions barrelling past tipping points, ecological sustainability coming into question in many parts of North Africa, and balance of payment strains rendering austerity a fixture of the policy regime in Egypt and Tunisia, it is critical that the system of exchange driving these outcomes finally be addressed. In the global south, this will minimally require that policymakers abandon policies of competitive devaluation and instead promote strategies that reflect the true ecological cost of production. The latter will entail identifying where points of leverage exist in the trade system and coordinating with regional peers to most durably exploit them.
Concerning points of leverage, the low Price Elasticity of Demand (PED) for key North African exports offers policymakers a real opportunity.[19] With Europe especially having few immediate alternatives for certain crops and minerals, a coordinated strategy supply management arrangement might allow for reductions to export volumes without incurring meaningful drops in export revenues. This is because planned cuts to supply should generate positive price effects for the goods in question. The duration of the effect could vary by good: It is possible that a meaningful jump in the price of phosphates would make extraction from the huge deposits discovered in Norway commercially viable and in so doing, potentially risk North Africa’s access to the European market. Nevertheless, this in and of itself would not be the worst outcome: a drop in demand offset by a spike in prices would provide ecological relief to countries like Egypt without eating into hard currency revenues. Indeed, the price outlook for a supply cut is strong, if slightly less for products like olive oil where there are close substitutes (butter, rapeseed oil) on the market. Were commodities producers in Sub-Saharan Africa, southern Europe, West Asia and North Africa integrated into the coordination framework, the potency of restricting supply would be even more enhanced. Ultimately, in managing the supply of primary goods, North Africa could not only reduce the social and ecological footprint of its existing export basket: it could, through wise investment of the revenues gained, open a window to capture more of of global value chains (i.e. investing in processing, branding, transportation infrastructure, etc.).
This would hardly be the first time that such an intervention in the marketplace was attempted. Managing commodity supply through coordinated export or production controls has, in fact, long been a lever through which states and firms influence global prices. Early in the twentieth century, private corporate alliances such as the U.S.-based Copper Export Association,[20] and several international aluminium cartels, sought to regulate output and sustain prices for their respective commodities.[21] In the wake of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration institutionalized this approach through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which mandated production cuts across major crops to stabilize collapsing agricultural prices.[22] Post-war decades, meanwhile, saw the proliferation of international commodity agreements covering commodities such as tea, rubber, sugar, coffee, and copper, which attempted to influence supply through export restrictions and production quotas.[23] And we have abundant examples from the present day, too. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) management of oil supplies is perhaps the most obvious. But we can also consider Indonesia’s 2020 ban on nickel exports, which led to a sharp rise in global nickel prices and strengthened the country’s bargaining position in the fast-growing battery supply chain.[24] Likewise, India’s temporary suspension of non-basmati rice exports in 2022–2023 led to a spike in world rice prices. The latter two cases show the power that even a single large producer can exert on global commodity markets. A commodity alliance containing within it multiple major exporters of the same commodity should certainly be able to do the same.[25] In coupling price gains with ecological premia, such an alliance could be the start of a more sustainable and resilient tomorrow for North Africa.
Downstream from the brass tacks of trade, policymakers across the global south should also demand that ecological costs be integrated into international trade accounting. This means moving beyond conventional trade statistics to report the environmental load per export dollar, making exports’ ecological costs transparent and quantifiable. This would provide a tool for conducting more effective Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for export and investment decisions that go beyond narrow carbon metrics.
Conclusion
In putting differentials in the per unit ecological cost of exchange front and center, the link between systemic currency undervaluation and the accelerating degradation of North Africa\’s natural and ecological capital becomes unmissable. As our research shows, North African exports embed dozens of times more resources, labour and localised ecological harm than their HIC counterparts. This stark imbalance is not an outcome of inefficiency but the designed result of a global price regime that systematically undervalues the region\’s commodities, labour, and natural resources.
The repeated implementation of currency devaluation policies, exemplified by the collapse of export prices for water-intensive commodities such as Egyptian oranges and Tunisian olive oil, is currently compelling the region to deplete its finite and precious resources at fire-sale prices merely to satisfy debt obligations and achieve marginal trade balance improvements. A pivot must be made for the region to have the future it deserves. As we contended in the previous section, such a pivot should entail an end to competitiveness-minded currency devaluations–and the embrace of a coordinated strategy for ecological revaluation. Philosophically speaking, it might also entail redefining our notions of success and prosperity. As is becoming increasingly clear, the welfare of nations is not measured in its volume of exports but in its capacity to regenerate the resource base rather than deplete it, thereby providing a healthy environment, social security and leisure to its citizens. Fighting for a global pricing system that accurately reflects the ecological and labour cost of production is essential for North Africa to make welfare gains of the second kind. It may also be the region’s last chance to avoid turning into a ‘sacrifice zone’–a place forsaken to sustain what are ultimately unsustainable global consumption patterns.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Photo Credit: Jbdodane “Port for Phosphate Export from the Bou Craa Mine”, Flickr (2013)
[1] Al Jazeera. “General Strike Shuts down Tunisia’s Gabes over Pollution Crisis.” Al Jazeera, October 21, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/21/general-strike-shuts-down-tunisias-gabes-over-pollution-crisis.
[2] Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), “بعد معركة قضائية دامت 10 سنوات: تيتان تبدأ تعويض ضحايا انتهاكاتها البيئية” [After a 10-Year Legal Battle, Titan Begins Compensating Victims of Its Environmental Violations], March 12, 2025, https://eipr.org/press/2025/03/بعد–معركة–قضائية–دامت-10-سنوات–تيتان–تبدأ–تعويض–ضحايا–انتهاكاتها–البيئية.
[3] International Financial Corporation (IFC). “IFC and OCP Group Partner to Build Solar Plants, Green Fertilizer Production in Morocco.” IFC, 2023. https://www.ifc.org/en/pressroom/2023/ifc-and-ocp-group-partner-to-build-solar-plants-green-fertilizer-production-in-morocco.
[4] European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). “EBRD and EU Foster Energy Efficiency in Egypt’s Cement Industry.” European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 2025. https://www.ebrd.com/home/news-and-events/news/2025/ebrd-and-eu-foster-energy-efficiency-in-egypt-s-cement-industry.html.
[5] Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE) refers to a field of study in political ecology and world-systems theory that examines how high-income countries systematically appropriate more biophysical resources such as land, energy, and materials through an International Division of Labour and trade, effectively outsourcing environmental costs of production to lower-income countries. It argues that structural inequalities in global trade allow wealthier nations to sustain consumption and growth by externalizing ecological degradation and labor intensity to the Global South. Key contributions include Bunker (1985), Hornborg (1998), and more recent empirical work by Dorninger et al. (2021) and Hickel et al. (2022), which quantify the total material and energy flows embodied in traded commodities.
[6] Gernot Köhler, “Estimating Unequal Exchange: Sub-Saharan Africa to the World.” Accounting for Colonialism, 2023, 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32804-6_14.
[7] East Fruit. “Prices for Oranges in Egypt Have Fallen to 15 Cents per Kg – How to Find New Markets Urgently?! .” East Fruit, April 22, 2024. https://east-fruit.com/en/news/prices-for-oranges-in-egypt-have-fallen-to-15-cents-per-kg-how-to-find-new-markets-urgently/.
[8] Our World in Data. “Water Productivity, GDP per Cubic Meter of Freshwater Withdrawal.” Our World in Data, 2025.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/water-productivity?mapSelect=MAR~TUN~EGY~LBY~DZA~OWID_HIC~OWID_UMC~OWID_LMC
[9] Osama Diab, “التكلفة المرتفعة للأسعار المنخفضة: صادرات الزراعة المصرية,” Almanassa, November 2025, https://almanassa.com/stories/27968.
[10] Daily News Egypt. “Egypt’s Agricultural Exports Surpass 7.2 Million Tonnes in 2025.” Dailynewsegypt, September 22, 2025. https://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2025/09/22/egypts-agricultural-exports-surpass-7-2-million-tonnes-in-2025/.
[11] Omnya Ahmed Saad El-Azazy and Samy Ghenmy. “An Economic Study of the Competitiveness of Egyptian Oranges in the Markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries.” Alexandria Journal of Agricultural Sciences 70, no. 4 (2025): 390–434. https://doi.org/10.21608/alexja.2025.390715.1143.
[12] East Fruit. “Prices for Oranges in Egypt Have Fallen to 15 Cents per Kg – How to Find New Markets Urgently?! .” East Fruit, April 22, 2024. https://east-fruit.com/en/news/prices-for-oranges-in-egypt-have-fallen-to-15-cents-per-kg-how-to-find-new-markets-urgently/.
[13] Osama Diab, “التكلفة المرتفعة للأسعار المنخفضة: صادرات الزراعة المصرية,” Almanassa, November 2025, https://almanassa.com/stories/27968.
[14] Ben Sik Ali, Ameni. “Understanding the Devaluation of the Dinar.” https://www.economie-tunisie.org/, 2023. https://www.economie-tunisie.org/sites/default/files/fiche_reforme_devaluation_eng.pdf.
[15] See: International Olive Council, “Olive oil statistics June/July 2025”, Report (Madrid, Spain).
Milling Middle East & Africa Magazine . “Tunisia’s Olive Oil Export Volumes Increase as Revenues Decline amid Global Price Crash .” Milling Middle East & Africa Magazine , August 26, 2025. https://millingmea.com/tunisias-olive-oil-export-volumes-increase-as-revenues-decline-amid-global-price-crash/.
[16] Knaepen, Hanne. “Climate Risks in Tunisia.” Cascades, February 2021. https://www.cascades.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Climate-risks-in-Tunisia-Challenges-to-adaptation-in-the-agri-food-system-1.pdf.
[17] IndexMundi. “Commodity Agricultural Raw Materials Index Monthly Price – Index Number.” IndexMundi, 2025. https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=agricultural-raw-materials-price-index&months=.
[18] IMF Monitor. “Conditionality.” IMF Monitor. Accessed October 21, 2025. https://www.imfmonitor.org/conditionality.
[19] See: Christian Bogmans, Andrea Pescatori, Ivan Petrella, Ervin Prifti, and Martin Stuermer, “The power of prices: how fast do commodity markets adjust to shocks”, Working Paper 24/77: International Monetary Fund (2024).
Thibault Fally and James Sayre, “Commodity trade matters”, Working Paper 24965: NBER Working Paper Series (2018).
[20] Rausser, Gordon & Stuermer. “A Dynamic Analysis of Collusive Action: The Case of the World Copper Market, 1882-2016.” MPRA Paper, February 2, 2020. https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/104708.html.
[21] Bertilorenzi, Marco. “Business, Finance, and Politics: The Rise and Fall of International Aluminium Cartels, 1914–45.” Business History 56, no. 2 (April 3, 2013): 236–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2013.771337.
[22] Bowers, Douglas, Wayne D. Rasmussen, and Gladys L. Baker. History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933–84. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1984. https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=41994
[23] Radetzki, Marian. “Price Formation and Price Trends in Exhaustible Resource Markets.” In Trade, Competition, and the Pricing of Commodities, edited by Frédéric Jenny and Simon Evenett. London: CEPR Press, 2012. https://cepr.org/publications/books-and-reports/trade-competition-and-pricing-commodities.
[24] Palaon, Hilman, and Robert Walker. “A Glimpse into Indonesia’s Nickel Policy.” Lowy Institute, August 23, 2024. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/glimpse-indonesia-s-nickel-policy.
[25] Nes, Kjersti, K. Aleks Schaefer, and Jisang Yu. “Economic Impacts of the Indian Ban on Non-Basmati Rice Exports.” Food Policy 134 (July 2025). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102893.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Devalued Money and Depleted Resources: The Ecological Consequences of Monetary Policy in North Africa’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘devalued-money-and-depleted-resources-the-ecological-consequences-of-monetary-policy-in-north-africa’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-11-14 15:36:36’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-11-14 14:36:36’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=834’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Abstract
This field-based ethnographic account explores how the Covid-19 pandemic was experienced, interpreted, and negotiated in the rural and refugee-hosting areas of Eastern Cameroon. Drawing on observations, informal conversations, and interviews, the study examines the local reception and reinterpretation of public health measures, the lived realities of confinement, and the reconfigurations of international aid.
Rather than treating the pandemic as a universal event, the analysis foregrounds its fragmented presence and uneven intensity, shaped by longstanding precarities, institutional mistrust, and situated logics of survival. Covid-19 is approached here as a social and political dispositive: an ensemble of norms, absences, and constraints whose local effects depended less on adherence than on adaptation, navigation, and reappropriation. By attending to everyday tactics, this article contributes to an anthropology of pandemics that centres lived experience, local meaning-making, and the micropolitics of crisis management from below.
On 17 March 2020, just eleven days after the first case of Covid-19 was detected in the country, the Cameroonian government announced a series of measures aimed at curbing the spread of the pandemic: closure of borders, schools, and entertainment venues (bars, nightclubs, etc.); a ban on public gatherings; restrictions on movement; and, from 13 April onwards, the mandatory wearing of face masks in public spaces.
Since then, several studies would document the political, economic, and social logics shaping Cameroon’s response to Covid-19. Through these prisms, researchers investigated public policy choices1, controversies and scandals surrounding the management of the crisis2, socio-economic effects3, low vaccination rates4, and widespread popular scepticism about the disease.
This piece offers a glimpse, both visual and verbal, into how the pandemic was experienced through the lens of everyday life in rural areas of Eastern Cameroon. Arriving in February 2020 for a second fieldwork period as part of my doctoral research, I found myself – unexpectedly – documenting, month by month, how the pandemic was received, bypassed, and interpreted by local Cameroonian populations, by refugees from neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), and by international NGO and UN agency staff tasked with implementing international assistance operations in the Kette district (Kadey division). The aim was to observe their day-to-day realities and listen to what they had to say5.
Figure 1. Locations and Fieldwork Sites Referenced in the Article
These field notes draw on ethnographic observations, informal conversations, and excerpts from interviews conducted with local and refugee populations, religious and traditional leaders, and staff from international aid organisations. What follows is a series of fragmentary scenes: challenged beliefs, reinterpreted health norms, constrained mobility, discreet tactics, forms of aid that were at once ubiquitous and disappointing. This account highlights a series of dissonances: between international directives and local constraints, between aid mechanisms and survival logics, between intervention categories and strategies of adaptation. The pandemic is thus repositioned within local hierarchies, where hunger, malaria, closed schools, or empty market stalls may, at times, take precedence over the virus itself. The objective here is to offer an account, from the margins, of what the health crisis produced, displaced, imposed, or made visible.
Note on the Use of Illustrations
To illustrate this article, I chose to use stylised images rather than direct photographs from the field, for two main reasons. First, some of these photographs, due to their aesthetic and composition, closely resemble those used in the communication campaigns of international aid organisations. Second, the choice reflects an ethical concern: in connection with issues of anonymisation and ongoing debates around the notion of “informed consent”6, the use of photographs raises questions regarding the protection of the anonymity of individuals featured in such images.
The sketches presented here were therefore created from field photographs that were subsequently processed into graphic form (filtered and treated using AI tools7). In doing so, they allow for visual representation of certain observations while safeguarding the integrity of the people involved and avoiding any potentially harmful institutional connotations.
“Let someone tell me whether this disease is real”: Doubt, Distrust, and the Negotiation of the Pandemic’s Meaning
The Virus as Suspicion
Although very few cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Eastern Cameroon, the virus circulated widely in discourse, rumour, and religious preaching – yet rarely featured in first-hand accounts. There were no “confirmed” deaths, few identifiable cases of illness, and health directives issued from above were often poorly understood, translated, or received.
In this context, what prevailed was not fear of the virus, but doubt: about its existence, its severity, and the intentions of those speaking about it. As a traditional leader from the region explained:
First, there is doubt – a big doubt – about the existence of this pandemic, or even of the coronavirus itself. […] People are sceptical; they’re not sure: does this virus really exist? For them, it’s a fabrication, a creation serving the economic interests of certain lobbies – perhaps even the government – to make money.8
This scepticism was rooted in a strong historical continuity: from the traumatic memory of colonial medicine9 to the mistrust generated by past health campaigns against diseases like smallpox or malaria, often marked by coercive or poorly understood protocols10. In everyday life, this doubt was also fuelled by several factors: the absence of visible cases, mistrust of official discourse, and the disconnect between alarming health messages and perceived reality. Without deaths or spectacular symptoms, the virus remained elusive, difficult to grasp as a tangible threat. The first deaths attributed to Covid-19 sparked scepticism, even anger, as expressed with irritation by a farmer from the Kette area:
That man had been diabetic for years. And now they’re saying it was Corona that killed him? It’s all just stories!11
This anger was further inflamed by reports of corrupt practices linked to certain pandemic prevention measures. It was said that hospitals, citing health regulations intended to prevent contagion, refused to return the bodies of deceased individuals unless the family “offers something”. Except for deaths whose cause was indisputable (such as road accidents), “coronavirus” was systematically listed as the cause of death on certificates. The rising number of Covid-attributed deaths was thus seen not as evidence of the virus’s lethality, but as a reflection of the new opportunities for financial extraction that it enabled.
Whether or not these claims were factually accurate mattered less here than the fact that they circulated. They revealed a tense relationship with the health system, where any prescription may be suspected of hiding a transaction or concealed interest. In a context of weak healthcare provision and widespread mistrust of authorities, rumours took on a structuring role. They expressed a longstanding distrust of the state and its agents, shifting the pandemic from the realm of medicine to that of social and political interpretation12.
Power, Faith, and the Politics of Doubt
From the outset, the pandemic was perceived as a matter of power: sanitary, political, and economic. This perception not only fuelled scepticism about the existence of Covid-19 but also fed a broader sense of anger that would, at times, erupt publicly. In March 2021, during the funeral of a local dignitary in Kette, these tensions came sharply into focus. When a former MP stood up to attribute the death to Covid-19, he provoked immediate outrage from the family and attendees, and had to leave in haste to avoid being assaulted. His words triggered such a wave of doubt and suspicion that the crowd demanded the coffin be opened to confirm that the chief’s body was indeed inside. The unrest escalated to such a degree that the sub-prefect was forced to call for intervention by the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), a special forces’ unit stationed in the region to combat incursions by Central African rebel groups. These elite forces secured the area and, with the support of staff from the district hospital, resealed the coffin, conducted the burial, and covered the grave with a concrete slab to prevent it from being reopened.
In this climate of uncertainty, various authorities found themselves in competition. On 18 March 2020, the Cameroonian government announced a series of measures: school closures, mandatory mask-wearing, movement restrictions, and physical distancing. But across the country, both the enforcement of these measures and, more significantly, how they were perceived, varied widely. Sub-prefects, security forces, managers of refugee camps, and INGO staff were all involved in implementing the response, each according to their own interpretation, resources, and priorities.
In this context, religious leaders played a decisive role. Respected and listened to – “because they are our guides and they look after our safety”, explained a Central African refugee – imams and priests used the space of religious sermons to recall examples of pandemics in sacred texts and to stress the importance, for instance, of “not leaving a plague-stricken area, nor entering one”. It was they who made several government measures more acceptable, especially those poorly received at the local level. For example, the closure of places of worship and the ban on public gatherings did not mean that religious practice had to stop altogether: sermons recalled that the Qur’an permits prayer at home, or even the suspension of mosque attendance when it is too cold, when a storm is approaching, or when “there is too much mud or difficulty”. Yet even among these respected figures, doubt persisted. As the imam of the main mosque in Boubara explained:
I comply with preventive measures. I also carry out awareness-raising. But I wonder whether this Covid disease they talk about actually exists?
In such a context, medical discourse – once it drifted too far from lived experience – was felt not only as distant, but at times as intrusive or even aggressive. Doubt, in response, did not signal apathy or indifference but rather a form of resistance: refusing to believe in the virus became a way to reject a discourse imposed from outside – one that dictated what to do, what to stop doing, and what to fear. It was a matter of lived experience, of hierarchies of authority, and of day-to-day survival. Doubt was not a pathology of belief: it was a strategy of adaptation. Faced with an external medical narrative often poorly aligned with local realities (as further illustrated below), doubt served to preserve room for manoeuvre. For many, the virus was a secondary concern, less troubling than hunger, the cost of transport, or experiences of stigmatisation. This was not denial, but rather a local reinterpretation of a global phenomenon. Doubt, in this context, was active; it formed part of the survival toolkit especially in settings marked by severe socio-economic precarity, as the next section illustrates.
“We Suffered”: Economic and Social Reorganisation in Response to the Pandemic
Covid-19 was a disease because it created hardship in terms of food rations and access to the water borehole.
Central African female refugee, farmer
This Covid-19 brought misery: famine, suspicion between people, financial hardship, the end of schooling, and more.
Cameroonian pre-school female teacher
Lockdown as an Impossible Luxury
In official discourse relayed from Yaoundé or through the local branches of INGOs, the injunction to “stay at home” was widely disseminated: avoid contact, close markets, limit non-essential travel. But these guidelines quickly came up against the realities of daily life in villages where most houses are not designed to be occupied all day, or in cramped and overcrowded refugee shelters. Added to this are the precarious livelihoods of a large part of the population. As one Central African male farmer, a long-term refugee in Cameroon, put it:
We can’t stay at home if there’s nothing to eat. We have no choice: we have to go out to find something to feed the family.
A Mbororo dignitary echoed this, explaining:
In our current socio-economic situation, it’s very difficult to impose a lockdown. Most people live day to day: if you don’t work today, you don’t eat. Or you won’t have anything to eat tomorrow. […] People survive one day at a time; they earn their daily bread after working. Not everyone has a salary, not everyone can plan their monthly expenses. That’s just not possible. It’s about daily earnings: if you don’t work today, you won’t eat. That’s the reality. So when they say ‘lockdown, no one goes out’ – no, that can’t work. It’s impossible.
For much of the population, public health guidelines were not perceived as protective measures, but rather as expectations impossible to meet within the constraints of everyday survival. In the rural areas of Eastern Cameroon, lockdown was not a public health option: it was a luxury, reserved for those with the means to stock up. Whether in villages or refugee settlements, salaried employment is rare. The local economy is largely based on daily income from farming, artisanal gold mining, or small-scale trading. Yet petty trade faced major logistical challenges due to restrictions on movement, the official closure of the border with the Central African Republic, and rising transport costs – which, for example, increased from 2,500 to 4,000 XAF (roughly €3.80 to €6) for the trip from Kette to Batouri – in a country where the minimum wage is around 36,000 XAF (about €55).
Holding Daily Life Together, Despite Everything
Aware of these realities, the authorities opted for a “partial lockdown”13: borders were closed, as were educational and training institutions; gatherings and movement were restricted, and a curfew was imposed. In the rural regions of Eastern Cameroon, people were still allowed to leave their homes – for example, to work in the fields or in small-scale artisanal gold mining sites – but evening gatherings, which usually punctuate the end of the day, were limited. Alongside the (official) closure of bars and other social venues, roadside activities were banned: female fish vendors, male and female cafeteria operators offering tea or spaghetti with eggs, informal traders: all were asked to shut down earlier than usual, typically between 6 and 10 p.m., depending on the area. As one male butcher explained, people tried to adapt, to “get by by selling during the day”, and to shop earlier – at least when possible and when the money was available.
Many households had to wait for family members to return from work to see whether that day’s earnings would cover basic needs – whether they could afford cooking oil or a specific ingredient. In families working in the gold sites, members only returned in the late afternoon and would still need to wash the ore and sell it before they could afford to go shopping. Early shop closures thus forced some households into debt, or to sell the few animals they raised – chickens, goats, sheep. In response to rising prices, others turned to what is locally called “bush provisioning” (ravitaillement champêtre), heading into the forest to forage for food, even if it meant changing their diet. One male farmer recounted feeding his family through fishing, while a male Central African herder, who had taken refuge in Cameroon in 2014, explained:
I stopped my job to take care of my family […]. I gathered all my children at home, and we went to the fields to look for vegetables.
Another hard-hit sector was made up of those whose income depended on schools. From March 2020 until the end of the academic year, the government ordered the closure of all educational and vocational training institutions14. This led to the sudden collapse of livelihoods for many: motorbike taxi drivers who provided school transport morning and evening; women selling beignets haricots (sweet fritters served with savoury red beans) or other meals in contexts where school canteens are rare; and neighbourhood shopkeepers who no longer saw children coming in to buy exercise books, pens, chalk, or “loaded bread” (pain chargé), the buttered or chocolate-filled half-baguettes eaten on the way to or at school.
Weekly markets continued to operate, but as prices soared and more and more products became unavailable, the authorities instructed people to comply with preventive measures (mesures barrières) and, in particular, to wear face masks. Yet, as one male primary school headteacher explained, masks “make you suffocate and burn your ears”, so they were mostly worn around the neck or under the chin, simply to avoid trouble during checks. Many people didn’t wear them at all: some cited the cost (500 XAF), others dismissed the requirement as mere “hassle”. When sub-prefects occasionally visited the markets to “monitor” compliance with the government’s health measures, they were met with scenes of hasty dispersal among those without masks. In a Cameroonian context marked by entrenched authoritarian routines15, it is not advisable to be seen openly defying state directives.
Public Health Measures: (Mis)Alignment, Evasion, and Reappropriation
Handwashing, Preventive Measures, and Local Habits
Even if many people expressed doubts about the seriousness or even the existence of the pandemic, this did not necessarily mean a wholesale rejection of all protective measures. The acceptability of these measures was largely proportional to how well they aligned with the realities and contexts in which they were applied. Thus, while lockdown was widely seen as creating more problems than it solved (as discussed earlier), other measures were more readily accepted, as explained by the same Mbororo community leader in Kadey:
Despite all the doubts about the existence of the disease, people were still careful and washed their hands regularly, because it doesn’t require much effort. Even before the pandemic, they’d been hearing this message for a long time, and they know that if you don’t wash your hands, you can catch diseases. They’ll tell you themselves: ‘Washing hands is no problem; we’ve always done it.’ […] Whether in Kette, in my neighbourhood, or here in Batouri, I heard it often: ‘Wash the children’s hands, you heard there’s that illness going around.’
Regular handwashing was easier to adopt because it reinforced habits already present before the pandemic. In Fulani households, people use boutas (small water jugs) and soap for the ritual ablutions performed before Islamic prayer. Among the Gbaya, families already shared a bucket or cup to rinse their hands before eating a communal meal. However, this apparently simple gesture reveals deeper disparities in access to resources, gendered roles, and logistical constraints. Regular handwashing depends on an entire chain of material and social dependencies. It requires increased consumption of water and soap, goods that are not always readily available. While some distributions were carried out by local authorities or INGOs, these were far from sufficient to meet the needs implied by public health recommendations. In some neighbourhoods, “handwashing stations” were installed – typically a bucket with a tap at standing height, along with a bar of soap (see Figure 2). But because no provisions were made for maintenance or resupply, many stations were empty within days. Some were vandalised, others simply neglected. In many villages, the link between public health messaging and the logistics of daily life was conspicuously absent from institutional discourse.
Figure 2. Example of a handwashing station in Eastern Cameroon (July 2020)
Regular handwashing also required increased water use, meaning more frequent trips to water sources or boreholes. This task typically fell to women and girls, sometimes with the help of children. People queued with their containers, and in the crowds that formed around water points, it became nearly impossible to respect physical distancing. These gatherings could also give rise to tension between users: “Women fight to get water,” explained a female resident of Boubara, noting that with so few water points compared to the number of users, “people push and jostle”. To reduce crowding, pandemic guidelines stipulated that only one member per household should go to collect water. But one person carries less than several would, so either multiple trips were needed – or the restriction was ignored.
INGOs sent staff to carry out awareness campaigns at water points. But as one male outreach worker admitted:
We tried, but it’s hard. Wearing a mask all the time, queuing up, waiting your turn… it’s hard. We did everything we could in terms of raising awareness and promoting preventive measures. But to be honest, if I were in their shoes, I don\’t think I could do it either! I say what I’m supposed to say, but deep down, I know I couldn’t even do it myself! (laughs)
In some neighbourhoods, a small-scale mobile water distribution system emerged, with vendors selling water door-to-door using handcarts – locally called pousses – loaded with six to ten 20-litre jerrycans, each sold for 100 XAF. But accessing this service required additional spending, making it available only to those with sufficient means.
Accessing Healthcare: Too Expensive, Too Risky?
Not all recommended protective measures met the same level of acceptance. Mask-wearing in particular came up against a range of obstacles: cost, discomfort, and unintended consequences, especially regarding access to healthcare. With the pandemic, wearing a face mask (referred to locally as cache-nez) became mandatory to enter health facilities. Yet, despite some distribution efforts by INGOs or certain local authorities, many people simply did not have one. Acquiring a mask represented a non-negligible expense for households whose incomes were already severely strained. At 500 XAF per mask, equipping both the sick person and their caregiver with a mask became a significant burden. For some families, this was enough to deter them from seeking medical care for their child, as this male community leader from Kadey explains:
When a household is overwhelmed just trying to find food, healthcare comes second. […] You see, people struggle even to get treatment for malaria. The child has a fever, they’re just lying there, but the mother can’t take them to the hospital because there’s no money. So she gives them bark to drink, things like that… And only when the child starts convulsing do they take them to a traditional healer. Sometimes the child pulls through… Sometimes, they don’t.
Other individuals avoided going to health centres for fear of infection. A male Central African herder, now a refugee in Cameroon, explained:
Now I’m the one who accompanies anyone who’s ill to the hospital, because my wife is too afraid of the disease.
As hospitals came to be seen not as places of care but as potential sites of contamination, many families turned instead to traditional healers. Remedies included concoctions made from neem leaves, or infusions of ginger and lemon. Seeking these treatments did not necessarily signal resistance to so-called modern medicine16. In fact, many people moved back and forth between the two systems: first trying local remedies, then going to the hospital if symptoms persisted. But during the pandemic, this usual complementarity was often interrupted – due to a lack of money, fear of contamination, or, as explained above, fear of being quarantined.
Facing the Reconfiguration of International Aid
INGOs Go Remote – and Refugees Step In
When the pandemic struck, INGOs supporting refugee populations in the area adapted both their activities and their modes of intervention. With schools closed, gatherings banned, and movement restricted, it was no longer possible to run education follow-up programmes, remedial classes, or various “awareness-raising” or “community mobilisation” workshops. At the same time, most organisations placed their staff under lockdown. As a result, the usual traffic of white 4x4s bearing the logos of UNHCR, UNICEF, IMC or ADES across the region dropped significantly.
Only staff in charge of so-called “essential” activities continued to move around the area; the rest worked remotely, often with unstable access to electricity or internet. Since they could no longer travel to the field, project implementation was delegated to intermediaries: “community relays” who were supplied with masks, hand sanitiser, mobile phone credit, loudspeakers, posters, and other visual materials, in order to promote preventative measures and other health measures within their villages or neighbourhoods. Some even used portable speakers strapped to the back of motorbikes to conduct so-called “Covid-19 awareness caravans” (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Covid-19 awareness caravan in the Kette district (July 2020)
This visibility helped to sustain the image of an active, responsive, and engaged international aid sector. But in the villages, two prevailing sentiments emerged. First, many felt that the aid on offer did not match their concrete needs. While some people welcomed the dissemination of information about the virus, the quantities of masks and soap distributed were widely seen as insufficient. More importantly, after several weeks, fatigue and frustration set in, driven by the impression that the Covid-19 response had eclipsed all other priorities, including essential needs. Due to supply chain disruptions and staff lockdowns, the World Food Programme (WFP) suspended its usual food distributions in the area for several months. When I spoke with women in the border village of Gbiti in August 2020, it was the first thing they mentioned. They expressed confusion over why food distributions had stopped precisely when supplies in local markets were dwindling and prices were rising sharply. A few months later, in November, during a coordination meeting between international aid actors, a UNHCR representative acknowledged:
We bought a lot of medical equipment – respirators and so on – which went unused. But a recent survey of refugees on the impact of Covid-19 found that 93% can no longer support themselves, and 73% can no longer afford to eat.
Second, by carrying out tasks usually reserved for INGO staff, so-called “beneficiaries” demonstrated their capacity to implement these assistance programmes directly. As one male employee of an INGO explained:
In the months following the pandemic, the refugees said they knew how to do the registrations, and everything else INGOs usually do. So they didn’t see the point of having humanitarian actors come and show them what to do. In every area, they even said the actors were misleading them. So the refugees said: ‘No, we don’t need someone to come tell us what to do.’
This phenomenon of direct subcontracting by some international aid organisations offered refugee populations an opportunity to reclaim agency over projects targeting them. What was initially justified by the health emergency increasingly became part of a broader logic of cost-efficiency and partial withdrawal of aid. As I observed over the year following the onset of the pandemic, many of these dynamics outlasted the official lifting of Covid-related restrictions. Faced with ongoing budget cuts, international NGOs and UN agencies continued to reduce their staffing and delegate various tasks – registration of new arrivals, day-to-day coordination, management of water points, food distributions – to the target populations themselves, sometimes organised into “committees” or referred to as “local relays” and “community mobilisers”.
Confined for Others: Inverted Vulnerability
In formal refugee camps, the measure with the greatest impact on displaced persons – though not in sanitary terms17 – was the strict lockdown to which they were subjected: UNHCR announced that refugees were no longer allowed to leave the camp premises. This approach sharply contrasted with the national policy adopted at the time, which favoured partial confinement. The justification given was twofold: to protect displaced populations from infection, and to prevent them from potentially infecting host communities. In doing so, the pandemic inverted the usual framing of vulnerability which, in Cameroon as in many other humanitarian contexts, is central to international aid operations18. The “vulnerable” were no longer the refugees targeted by assistance programmes, but the surrounding host populations whom they might endanger.
In a context where most refugees rely on daily outings beyond the camps to secure livelihoods, this strict lockdown imposed by international institutions deprived people of their basic means at the very moment when, as seen above, border closures and movement restrictions had already led to shortages and price inflation. The worsening of living conditions caused by this “protective confinement” policy constitutes a form of structural violence, akin to that observed during Ebola epidemics: the “the way institutions and practices inflict avoidable harm by impairing basic human needs”19.
Moreover, while the Cameroonian government officially began easing pandemic-related restrictions on 30 April 2020, a stricter system of quarantine was simultaneously introduced in the camps, even though no Covid-19 cases had yet been detected there. Refugees already under lockdown were now subject to an additional layer of control with the construction of prefabricated buildings meant to serve as Covid-19 isolation centres (see Figure 4). These centres were designed with a one-way entrance, leading first to a “yellow zone”, where symptomatic individuals were tested. If they tested positive, they were transferred to a “red zone”, where they remained for two weeks in isolation, receiving medical and food assistance from aid organisations. After this period, they were moved to a “green zone” for post-recovery observation before being allowed to leave.
Figure 4. Isolation centre built by UNHCR to host individuals who tested positive for Covid-19 (May 2020)
Despite their very limited use (in Timangolo, only seven people were ever isolated), these centres encountered strong opposition from the refugee population. Many individuals refused to go, fearing stigmatisation, or preferring to isolate at home. Others relied on accounts from those who had gone through the process and returned disillusioned, reporting inadequate food rations and the absence of any financial compensation to support their families while they were quarantined and unable to provide.
In reaction to this intensified confinement, some refugees chose to leave the camps altogether and settle in the bush, where they could both escape restrictions and survive off wild foraging and local resources. Others described waiting for nightfall – once UN and INGO staff had left – to “sneak out of the camp […] and cross the border into CAR”, or go to the gold-mining sites “to find something to support the family”. These practices illustrate the ways in which refugee populations adapted, resisted, and circumvented the immobilising mechanisms imposed upon them.
Conclusion
This field account did not seek to explain the Covid-19 pandemic, to measure its impact, or to assess the adequacy of the responses it generated. Rather, it aimed to follow how the crisis manifested in the everyday lives of rural and refugee populations in East Cameroon. By paying close attention to its detours, side effects, and local reappropriations, the aim was to observe how this global health crisis was integrated, subverted, challenged or ignored – not through denial, but out of necessity, survival logic, or a different way of making sense of things.
The pandemic did not unfold with the same intensity everywhere, nor did it operate through the same frameworks. In the sub-division of Kette, it sometimes existed less as a virus than as a device: a set of norms, gestures, closures, noise, expectations, and absences. It brought into being a reality shaped by new constraints, but also by revealing forces – exposing the precariousness of livelihoods, the fragility of aid structures, and the political uses of vulnerability.
Faced with often ill-adapted instructions and partially withdrawn support systems, local actors – whether Central African refugees, Cameroonian residents, or aid workers – improvised, adjusted, circumvented. Doubting the virus, wearing masks under the chin, going out at night, selling goods earlier in the day, praying at home, giving one’s child an herbal remedy: all these were strategies forged in the interstices of mistrust, weariness, conviction, and cunning.
By documenting these scenes, this text hopes to contribute to an ethnography of pandemics that is not centred on political decisions or health statistics alone, but on what such crises do to the ordinary. On how they settle into the folds of the everyday, confront local logics, and at times reinforce – or reconfigure – pre-existing inequalities.
Footnotes
1 Alexandre T. Djimeli, « La communication publique sur la Covid-19 au Cameroun : une lecture systémique des logiques d’action dans le temps de l’« angoisse pandémique » », Djiboul 1, no 7 (2024): 3‑18.
2 Larissa Kojoué et al., « Rendre compte de la fracture politique. Crise sanitaire, communication gouvernementale et légitimité politique au Cameroun », Global Africa, no 9 (2025): 130‑41; Mahama Tawat, « Fake News and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: A Study of Practices and Sociopolitical Implications in Cameroon », SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY, 21 mai 2021).
3 Raoul Ehode Elah, « Etat des lieux de l’impact socioéconomique de la Covid-19 au Cameroun », Revue de l’académie des sciences sociales du Cameroun, no 18 (2022): 501‑13.
4 Jerome Nyhalah Dinga et al., « Factors Driving COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Cameroon and Their Implications for Africa: A Comparison of Two Cross-Sectional Studies Conducted 19 Months Apart in 2020 and 2022 », Vaccines 10, no 9 (2022): 1401; Ramatu Abdu et Nixon Kahjum Takor, « COVID 19 Immunization (Vaccine) Reticence and Traditional Healthcare Resilience among the Mbororos of the North-West Region (Cameroon), 2020- 2022 », Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022, 8.
5 All expressions in quotation marks in the text are verbatim excerpts from informal conversations (author’s translation from French).
6 Daniel Cefaï, « Codifier l’engagement ethnographique ? Remarques sur le consentement éclairé, les codes d’éthique et les comités d’éthique », in L’Engagement ethnographique (Paris: EHESS, 2010), 493‑512; Isabelle Clair, « Faire du terrain en féministe », Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 213, no 3 (2016): 81.
7 Designed with the help of Fotor software: https://goart.fotor.com/
8 Interview, Batouri, 19/03/2021.
9 Guillaume Lachenal, Le médicament qui devait sauver l’Afrique (2014), Paris : La Découverte ; Sara Lowes & Eduardo Montero, “The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa”, American Economic Review, vol. 111, n°4 (2021): 1284–1314.
10 Emmanuelle Roth, “Epidemic temporalities: A concise literature review”, Anthropology Today, vol. 36, n°4 (2020): 13-16; Dinga et al., “Factors Driving COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Cameroon”.
11 Informal discussion, Kette district, August 2020.
12 Kojoué et al., « Rendre compte de la fracture politique ».
13 Antoine de Padoue Nsegbe, Désiré Ndoki, et Aristide Yemmafouo, « Gouvernance de la Covid-19 et impacts socio-économiques et politiques des mesures prises dans le cadre de la lutte contre la pandémie au Cameroun », Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer n° 282, no 2 (2020): 419‑35.
14 See Lefort-Rieu & Ngodji, « Aide internationale et gouvernances éducatives en situation de pandémie : la Covid-19 au Cameroun », Cahiers d’études africaines, n°250 (2023) : 243-262.
15 Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, « Routines autoritaires et innovations militantes », Politique africaine, vol. 108, n°4 (2007) : 155-172.
16 Claire Lefort-Rieu et al., « La santé globale à l’épreuve du local en contexte pandémique : réceptions et (re)négociations des normes et modèles de lutte contre la pandémie de Covid-19 au Cameroun », Suds, no 288 (2023): 15‑46.
17 Between March and December 2020, UNHCR recorded nineteen positive cases of Covid-19 among the 280,000 ‘people of concern’ under its mandate in Eastern Cameroon (data presented during a UNHCR coordination meeting on the update of its ‘East Cameroon Covid-19 Contingency Plan’; field observation, 01/03/2021, Yaoundé).
18 Joël Glasman, « Vulnerability: impartial algorithms and analog malnutrition », in Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2019), 211‑42.
19 Annie Wilkinson et Melissa Leach, « Briefing: Ebola–myths, realities, and structural violence », African Affairs 114, no 454 (1 janvier 2015): 136‑48.
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Since 2020, Oman has embarked on one of the most ambitious green energy initiatives in the world: targeting $140 billion in investments between now and 2050 to reorient the Omani economy away from fossil fuels and towards becoming one of the largest green hydrogen exporters in the world. The numbers are staggering: 300 million solar panels, 10,000 wind turbines, 180 gigawatts of renewable capacity, and 100 gigawatts of electrolyser capacity, to be built between now and 2050.[1] The government hopes that the green economy will supply 55% of Oman’s new jobs between now and 2050, with 70,000 in the hydrogen sector alone.
By betting big on the green transition, and green hydrogen in particular, Oman hopes to draw in foreign investment, increase domestic innovation, and decarbonise its economy to achieve net zero by 2050. Based on almost a dozen interviews and a variety of public sources, this article looks at the challenges the sector faces, but also the serious institutional and political groundwork that has been laid to ensure that Oman is well-positioned to capitalise on future global demand for hydrogen.
Why Oman
China produces more hydrogen electrolysers than the rest of the world combined and is the world’s largest producer and consumer of hydrogen. Japan is the only country that has brought commercial hydrogen-fueled vehicles to market, and the EU has the world’s most far-reaching hydrogen mandates. So why is it that, on a per capita basis, Oman has by far the most ambitious green hydrogen strategy in the world?
The first part of the answer is geography. Oman is one of the sunniest countries in the world. It also has a long and predictably windy coastline, meaning that, as a person familiar with a green hydrogen project in Salalah stated, “renewable energy quality here is second-to-none.” Having one of the lowest population densities in the Middle East factors, too: there is more than enough space to build vast renewable energy sites without angering hordes of NIMBYs. A final geographic benefit is location: Oman is midway between East Asia and Europe, the areas expected to be the largest future green hydrogen markets.
Second is politics. Oman set up a new entity, Hydrom, in October 2022 to masterplan the country’s hydrogen strategy, regularize the tendering process, and bring continuity to the execution of the national hydrogen strategy. A person involved in developing export infrastructure between Oman and Europe said that “There is consistency in Oman’s planning. They are moving very steadily towards the realization of their vision.” Part of that vision has been to create a more transparent process around land reservation agreements: instead of deals being signed directly with the Minister of Energy and Minerals, interested parties have to go through a public auction process and sign deals with Hydrom instead, creating more clarity around prices in addition to more contractual certainty. One person familiar with the Hydrom auctions said the process was more investor-friendly than what came before: “Hydrom will think of rules of engagement, the Minister [of Energy and Minerals] will put it into a ministerial decree and then it’s basically law. We would negotiate, they would discuss, and a decision would be taken the next day, and they would come back to us.” A person familiar with the second round of auctions said the Ministry of Energy and Minerals “was “one of the best ministries I’ve ever interacted with. Incredibly competent, incredibly receptive.” Several interviewees also emphasized that Oman’s long and close relationship with European countries and political stability made it an appealing partner: political risk is low, institutional willingness is high.
Strategies and Institutions
Oman’s green hydrogen strategy was announced in October 2022. By 2030, the strategy targets 8-10GW in electrolyser capacity and 16-20GW in renewable capacity to create up to 1 million tonnes per year (mtpa) of green hydrogen. By 2040, plans call for 3.25mtpa in green hydrogen production, realized through 35-40GW in electrolyser capacity and 65-75GW in renewables capacity. By 2050, the goal 7.5-8.5mtpa in green hydrogen output, which will require inputs of up to 185GW of renewable energy powering 100GW of electrolysers.[2] To put this all in perspective, when Oman’s strategy was announced the total global installed electrolyser capacity for hydrogen production was about 700MW.[3] Should Oman achieve its targets, by 2040, the country’s hydrogen exports would represent 80% current LNG exports in energy-equivalent terms. The 2050 target of 8.5mtpa would double the energy contents of current LNG exports.[4]
These heady goals were announced in the context of skyrocketing energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when for a period green hydrogen was cheaper than grey hydrogen.[5] The IEA wrote in 2023 that “Oman has the potential to become one of the most competitive producers of renewable hydrogen” in the world.[6]
Capitalising on this burgeoning interest, Oman launched the aforementioned Hydrom (also known as Hydrogen Development Oman) in October 2022. Hydrom is wholly owned by the Omani government though Energy Development Oman, a major player in the Omani energy sector, and is led by the former chairman of Oman’s national utilities company. As intimated, Hydrom is mandated to “master plan the [hydrogen] sector”, including on regulatory design, overseeing auctions, facilitating he development of shared infrastructure, and coordinating logistics.[7] Projects that existed before Hydrom, including a BP-run project, Hyport Duqm, and Green Energy Oman, were given priorities on land allocation but were required to match the prices from the open Hydrom auctions.
In February 2023, Royal Decree 10/2023 was promulgated, which allocated 50,000km2 of land for renewable energy and clean hydrogen projects. Management of the land was placed under the control of Hydrom.[8] The IEA estimates that this land, located in the Al Wusta and Dhofar governorates, is enough to produce 25m tonnes of hydrogen per year, three times Oman’s 2050 target.[9]
Several other Omani entities are involved to realize these ambitions. OQ, the national oil company, is an investor in three legacy projects: Through a subsidiary called OQAE, it holds stakes in SalalaH2, Hyport Duqm, and Green Energy Oman. OQ also retains a back-in right to purchase a 20% stake in any of the projects auctioned by Hydrom.
While the projects are expected to produce their own electricity through solar and wind, Omani firms will be responsible for some common user infrastructure. Electricity infrastructure will be handled by the Oman Electricity Transmission Company (OETC). Water will be handled by Nama, the Omani state-owned utilities company, though Marafiq, which operates utilities in the Duqm special economic zone, and Majis, which provides water utilities in Sohar, will also play a role. OQGN, another OQ subsidiary, is the sole owner and operator of Oman’s natural gas transmission network and will also be responsible for operating the Omani hydrogen pipeline system once it is built. At the time of writing, OQGN is developing the commercial and regulatory framework for hydrogen transport, including economic incentives.[10] According to the company’s 2024 annual report, it last year spent OMR 940,337 (~$2.44 million) on hydrogen and CO2 pipeline construction, and had spent another OMR 34,028 (~88,200) by Q2 2025.[11] InfraCo, set up in December 2023 to set up to oversee the development of the common hydrogen infrastructure, is still inactive according to March 2025 financial filings.[12]
What is notable about Hydrom, and the Omani hydrogen sector in general, is that Omani government entities are primarily playing facilitating roles. Oman does not have a state-owned renewable energy giant like Saudi Arabia has in ACWA Power or the UAE has in Masdar, and policymakers appears to have made the decision that bringing in foreign expertise is the easier and cheaper way of expanding its hydrogen industry.[13] Developers in the sector are predominantly private actors, with state-owned OQ at most taking at 20% stake through its back-in right. Using foreign knowhow to execute plans drafted by the government is a method Oman knows well: Several of its ports are jointly owned with European firms, its electricity transmission system is minority-owned by the Chinese national grid operator, and its renewable energy projects are built by foreign entities.
Hydrom and the ecosystem its building indicates that the government of Oman is focusing its energies on what it knows – logistics and project management – while expanding its role in enabling industries, like wind turbine production.[14] Two people interviewed for this article, one from the steel industry and a former employee of OQ, believed that Oman will repeat its oil industry experience with hydrogen by building up the sector with foreign specialists before focusing on Omanization down the line. This line of thinking was echoed by the individual familiar with the hydrogen auctions, who said “I think the Minister of Energy, the Oman Investment Authority, and the Minister of Finance can convince the cabinet that it’s more important to get the investments in and then job creation will follow later.”
The Projects
Hydrom requires winning developers to cover the full green hydrogen value chain: developers are tasked with building renewable energy sites, producing hydrogen, turning hydrogen into a derivative product, and finding markets (i.e. offtakers) for the goods in question. The hydrogen derivative most favoured by firms is ammonia due to ammonia transport technology being more mature than that of liquid hydrogen transport. For that reason, many projects are interchangeably described as green hydrogen or green ammonia projects.
Funding for the projects comes from debt raised by developers, equity stakes, and offtake contracts. The third of these options has presented major bottleneck issues, which will be discussed more below. Hydrom offers some incentives, including a 90% reduction in land lease fees during the early stages of project development, reduced royalty payments in the early years of operation, and corporate tax exemptions for up to 10 years. Beyond this, there does not appear to be state-led financing initiatives; ACME Group’s project in Duqm, the only project that has entered the construction phase, received major funding from Indian governmental entities.
First Round – Duqm
The first auction round awarded two projects around Duqm. The project won by the Amnah consortium targets 200,000 tonnes per year (200 ktpa) of green hydrogen to be exported and used in local green steel production, with an intended start date in 2028. The project won by the HyDuqm consortium, which consists of Korea’s Posco Holdings, Samsung Engineering, Engie, and three other firms, likewise targets 200 ktpa in hydrogen production as feedstock for 1.2mtpa of ammonia. For its energy input, the consortium plans to develop of 5GW of wind and solar capacity.
Three legacy initiatives were also given land grants in Duqm. Green Energy Oman (GEO) is a joint venture between OQ, Shell, and three other firms, which plans to produce 150ktpa of green hydrogen from 4GW of renewables for up to 1mtpa of ammonia export in its first phase.[15] In an earlier press release the company stated its ambition to have a project fuelled by 25GW of renewable energy at full capacity.[16] BP also received a land allocation for a green hydrogen project to create 150,000 tonnes of green hydrogen.[17] However, the continued existence of BP’s exclusive project is unclear due to the company’s investment in another project: in July 2024 BP announced it bought a majority stake in the third Duqm legacy project, Hyport Duqm, a joint venture between DEME and OQ. This project targets 180ktpa of hydrogen production and 1mtpa of ammonia.[18]
Second Round – Salalah
In April 2024, Hydrom’s second public auction awarded two projects in the area around Salalah port. The first, won by a consortium of EDF, J Power, and Yamna, aims to produce 178ktpa of green hydrogen for 1mpta of ammonia by 2030, using 4.5GW of renewable energy to power 2.5GW of electrolysers.[19] The second project, a joint venture between Actis and Fortescue, is of a similar size: 4.5GW of renewables for 200ktpa of green hydrogen, to be sold to local offtakers and processed into derivatives for export.[20]
In December 2023 Hydrom also awarded OQ, Marubeni, Dutco, and Samsung C&T a green hydrogen block to create hydrogen and ammonia from 4GW of renewable energy. Based on a May 2025 presentation by two of the project partners, its planned to be operational in 2030.
Other projects
In December 2021 ACWA Power, OQ, and Air Products signed an agreement to develop a $6.5bn project, but this endeavour has not been mentioned in any later Hydrom publications.[21]
A final project that did not fall under any of the hydrogen auctions is the ACME-led project in Duqm. Scatec, originally a partner, stepped out of it in 2023,[22] though at the time of writing it is the only green hydrogen project in Oman that has entered the construction stage. In March 2024, Yara, a Norwegian fertilizer company, signed an offtake agreement for 100ktpa of green ammonia, the first of its kind in the world.[23] During the initial phase, the ACME-led project targets 100ktpa of green ammonia production based on 450W of renewable energy at a cost of USD 750 million.[24] The project will be increased to 280ktpa over two successive phases (which will operate under Hydrom’s regulatory framework), and is planned to reach a total output of 1.2mtpa fuelled by 5.5GW of solar power when it is fully operational.[25] The speed at which this project gets built and expanded will be a good indicator of the overall trajectory of Oman’s hydrogen sector: the project obtained $484 million in funding in July 2023, signed an offtake agreement in March 2024, and satellite imagery indicates that preparatory construction work started in late summer 2024. The plant is scheduled for commissioning in Q1 2027.
An interviewee said that generally speaking, the time between final investment decision (FID) and start of operations for large-scale hydrogen projects is four to five years. If that tendency holds, most of the projects detailed above would become operational after Hydrom’s 2030 target. With many already facing delays or lacking in specified deadlines, the lag could be significant. To date, the only projects that look to be on schedule are those that either reduced their scope or opted for a phased approach to construction.
Infrastructure
Infrastructural expansion is vital for facilitating Oman’s hydrogen ambitions. Plans on this front can be placed in two categories: transport infrastructure and power and water production.
For domestic transport, OQGN plans to build 300-400km of pipelines by 2030, with a final investment decision scheduled for 2027.[26] However, according to the company’s financial statements, OMR 974,000 ($ ~2.53 million) has already been spent on preparatory work. The first phase will be pipelines in the Al Jazir, Duqm, and Salalah concession areas. In the second phase, these pipelines will be joined together, and additional infrastructure will be built to facilitate overland export to the UAE. In the third and final phase, scheduled to be completed by 2050, pipelines will link Muscat to the hydrogen system. Asyad Group, an Omani logistics firm, estimated that a proposed 1,000km pipeline between the south and north of the country will have a capacity of 500,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year.[27] Considering the much larger volumes developers are planning to produce, long-distance in-country transport of hydrogen is likely to play a minor role for the overall sector, with the majority of hydrogen produced near export terminals or industrial offtakers.
Indeed, a second consideration of perhaps greater priority is coastal export infrastructure. Oman already exports about 200ktpa of ammonia through its ports, but the country’s facilities will need to expand by orders of magnitude to facilitate its green ammonia export plans. Salalah Port has an ammonia storage facility at the time of writing, but the port nevertheless plans to expand its infrastructure as demand for green ammonia grows. Sur, in the north, also has some ammonia export infrastructure, and in Duqm, Dutch tank storage firm Vopak entered a joint venture with the Oman Tank Terminal Company in October 2025 to build energy storage facilities.[28] Infrastructure expansion in Salalah and Duqm will be prioritized over Oman’s other ports, as these two will be the main gateways for the planned green hydrogen projects.
Oman is also pioneering new transport technology to better use its competitive advantage for cheap hydrogen exports. In April 2025, the Netherlands and Oman signed a joint development agreement for a liquified hydrogen transport corridor between Duqm and the Port of Amsterdam.[29] Liquified hydrogen shipping is a small industry (there is one ship globally at the time of writing), though it offers some clear advantages for Oman. Currently, the easiest way to transport hydrogen is to convert it to ammonia by adding nitrogen, which can be transported at -33C (hydrogen must be transported at -253C). However, once the ammonia arrives at its destination, it has to be “cracked” to split the nitrogen and ammonia, an energy-intensive and therefore expensive process. The advantage of liquid hydrogen transport is that the energy-intensive stage of the process (the cooling) happens in Oman where energy is cheap, while ammonia cracking happens in the Netherlands, Germany, or Japan, where energy is more expensive. However, as the small size of the global liquid hydrogen shipping fleet indicates, the technology has not reached commercial viability yet. One person familiar with the liquid hydrogen export plans puts it this way: “The individual technologies of this process are mature, with the focus now on applying them at scale.” The upshot is that while liquid hydrogen transport has theoretical advantages in cost, transport, and ease of offtake, the technology is not yet widely used. Ammonia transport, on the other hand, has proven technology applied in a well-developed market spanning the globe.
Power and Water
Oman is a water-stressed country, and while it may seem reckless to situate a water-intensive industry like hydrogen production there, a closer look at the numbers suggests this is not the case. IRENA estimates that one kilogram of green hydrogen requires 17.5kg of water.[30] Assuming that Oman reaches its 2050 target of 8.5mtpa of hydrogen production per year, it would need about 144.5bn kilograms of water, or 144.5 million m3. This is undoubtedly a large volume of water. With large-scale desalination, however, it can be reached without undue trouble. The Ghubrah III desalination plant will have a capacity of 300,000m3 once it is completed.[31] As such, the amount of freshwater required to reach its hydrogen goals by 2050 would equal the capacity of 1.5 Ghubra III plants, or a 30% increase in Oman’s desalination capacity, comparable to the consumption of Muscat governorate in 2024. Not insignificant, but well within reason.
Power production is another story. According to Nama, Oman’s utilities company, electricity generating capacity in Oman in 2024 was 10.2GW. Based on an annual growth rate of 7.2% (which was growth rate from 2023 to 2024 in electricity production), Oman’s non-hydrogen generating capacity would reach about 60GW by 2050. Assuming Oman reaches its goals, the installed capacity of the solar and wind farms that feed hydrogen electrolysis would be three times the capacity of the non-hydrogen economy. Installing this amount of renewable energy is no small task.
Because only one green hydrogen project of comparable size to those in Oman is under construction, estimates on how quickly such projects can be built are imprecise. Based on extant projects in 2025 and announced projects through 2028, the annual growth rate in Oman’s renewable energy capacity is ~21%. For Oman to reach its low 2030 target of 16GW, the growth rate would have to increase to 50%, and to a staggering 70% to reach the high 2030 target of 30GW. This type of scaling is not realistic. For the 2040 targets of 65GW or 75GW, the annual growth rate would have to be 25.6%-26.6%, which is high but within the bounds of reason. The 2050 targets of 175GW and 185GW, would need constant annual growth rates of 19.1% and 19.4%, respectively. While this growth rate is feasible, the scale of actual installation in the late 2040s (~30GW in 2049, ~20GW in 2048) is still enormous. This rate would also entail serious delays to Oman’s announced schedule: the 30GW target, originally scheduled for 2030, would be reached in 2040, and the 2040 target of 75GW would be reached in 2045.
Another possible reference point is the Neom Green Hydrogen Company (NGHC), a which has 2.2GW electrolyser capacity powered by 4GW of renewables. Satellite imagery shows that early construction on the associated solar plant started in early 2023 and the project is scheduled to be operational in early 2027. If we assume that Oman starts out installing green hydrogen-related renewables as fast as the NGHC (at a rate of 1GW/year) but speeds up the process each year to become more than three times faster by 2050, Oman still only manages to install 61GW by that date, far below its stated goal.
It is possible for Oman to build enough power infrastructure to reach its 2050 hydrogen goals: China built 373GW of renewable energy, twice Oman’s goal by 2050, in a single year in 2024. However, for that there first needs to be a market for green hydrogen and ammonia, and that is where the real challenges start.
The Challenges of Foreign Markets
Based on the time needed to build these projects and the availability of funding, Oman’s 2030 targets for green hydrogen seem out of reach. “No way” was how one person involved in the auctions put it when asked about the feasibility of the 2030 goals. But as the same interlocutor went on to say “This is not Oman’s fault. Oman put a lot of effort into developing the hydrogen infrastructure and rules and regulations because Europe wanted hydrogen, and then two years later Europe didn’t want hydrogen anymore.” This perspective was echoed by a European hydrogen expert:
“What happened in Europe is that there was enormous hype – that hydrogen was necessary for everything – and because of that the expectations were inflated enormously, and the timelines became very unrealistic. Plans that Germany and the Netherlands believed would be partially operational by 2025 or 2026 and complete by 2030 will now only be ready 2032. The result is that a lot of import projects are struggling to conclude contracts because they cannot get the hydrogen to the location where it is needed.”
The European market for hydrogen is primarily focused on the Netherlands and Germany, two countries whose demand is expected to be high but whose capacity to produce is limited. The two countries have co-funded H2Global, an initiative that hopes to remove some of the risk for early movers in the hydrogen market by signing long-term contracts with sellers and short contracts with offtakers, in addition to covering the price difference between what sellers need and what offtakers want to pay. However, the H2Global programme has a few structural issues that make it an imperfect vessel to kickstart the Omani hydrogen sector.
First is the size of the budget. While H2Global’s second auction has a headline figure of a respectable €3bn,[32] the individual lots are substantially smaller than that, at around €590m.[33] Considering the price of individual projects in Oman is north of €5bn, this, as the person familiar with a Salalah project put it, “doesn’t do a dent” in changing the cost calculus. This perspective was shared by the person involved in Omani hydrogen exports, who said that H2Global’s “carrot is too small; it is effectively compensation of €50 million a year which while substantial isn’t so big that you are suddenly hitting the spot for offtakers.” A second issue is the length of the contracts that Hintco, the H2Global trading entity, signs. Hydrogen purchase agreements are for 10 years, while the sales agreements are for 1 year only. For both producers and offtakers, this is too short: producers would prefer 15-year purchase agreements, while offtakers don’t want to work on one-year time horizons – it’s too unpredictable to make long-term decisions. Third is the size of the lots. The round 1 renewable ammonia lot was for an average of 66ktpa, far below the output of even one of the planned projects in Oman.[34]
Yet Oman’s hydrogen plans haven’t only faced obstacles in Europe. Two other markets highlighted in Hydrom’s launch presentation as “likely major importers”, Japan and South Korea, come with their own set of challenges.
Japan and Korea: Price Sensitive and Pragmatic
Japan has a long history with hydrogen and has put serious political and economic weight behind plans to grow the global hydrogen market. In October 2024, the Hydrogen Society Promotion Act came into effect. The Act’s purpose is to grow the demand for low-carbon (meaning green and blue) hydrogen, and the Japanese government has set aside $19bn for this initiative.[35] The contract for difference (CFD) structure means the fund compensates hydrogen buyers based on the difference in price between hydrogen and another comparable product. For blue or green hydrogen and ammonia, the comparative reference points will generally be LNG and coal prices, depending on the industry in which these products are used.[36] Through the Act, Japan wants to meet the goals of two other plans, the Basic Hydrogen Strategy and the 2021 Strategic Energy Plan, which target 12mtpa of hydrogen use by 2040 and 1% usage of hydrogen or ammonia in power generation by 2030, in addition to co-firing ammonia at coal-fuelled power plants.[37]
The good news for Oman is that Japan’s hydrogen strategy is deeply anchored in policymaking and industry and has substantial top-line funding behind it. The hydrogen consumers in Japan are also on or close to the coast and are therefore less reliant than their European counterparts on (chronically delayed) transport infrastructure. The less encouraging piece of news is that Japan’s green hydrogen market is likely to remain small for the time being. A Japanese hydrogen expert interviewed argued that “Japan takes a technology-driven approach where they start with whatever technology is mature.” As a result, the country has a strong preference for blue hydrogen, rather than the more expensive (and less mature) green hydrogen. A person familiar with one of the projects in Salalah echoed this, saying that the east Asian markets are “carbon intensity markets”, where CO2 emissions need only be “low enough”; price is a bigger driver than environmental factors. Japan’s CFD tender, the results of which will come in March 2026, is therefore likely to primarily fund blue hydrogen and ammonia projects, to the detriment of Oman’s export-focused projects.
The story in Korea is similar. The weight given to price in a 2024 clean hydrogen auction meant that blue projects were advantaged over renewable energy-fuelled ones.[38] Of greater concern, only 11% of the auction volume was qualified due to the price ceiling of the tender.[39] A second auction in 2025 was abruptly cancelled right before the bid deadline due to changed policy priorities of the new Korean cabinet.[40] For Oman, this means that a hoped-for export market is becoming increasingly uncertain.
Green hydrogen is, for now, only an option in markets with strict mandates for the product. As the person familiar with the Salalah project said, “For green [hydrogen], you need Europe.”
Conclusion
Oman’s hydrogen sector has the fundamentals in place: land on which projects can be built, vast renewable energy generation capacity, political support, and a beneficial geographic location. The one thing missing is a market. As the person familiar with one of the Salalah projects explained, “If there is a market and there are offtakers, the project will be constructed. Other [energy] projects have been made in worse places with more challenging requirements.”
The scale of the Omani projects is a double-edged sword. On one hand, their vast size drives down the price per kilogram of hydrogen, making it more competitive compared to the small-scale production sites in Europe. The drawback is that the capital expenditures required are beyond what many investors and offtakers are comfortable with. According to the person familiar with the Hydrom auctions: “They all need to get an offtaker who needs to sign for at least five to ten years. That would be a five-to-ten-year contract of almost a billion a year in a non-proven market. Who is going to do that?”
With offtakers in Japanese and Korean markets too price sensitive and the European markets too small and slow to develop, Oman has a few options. The first is to incentivize local industry. Two individuals interviewed, one from a steel company and another from an Omani refinery, both said that current projects are export-focused and there are no clear plans the next five years to supply hydrogen to local industrial offtakers. But the Middle East is already the world’s largest producer of direct reduced iron, a market that has huge growth potential and that can position countries like Oman at the forefront of the global green iron and steel trade.[41] Instead of waiting for slow permitting and inconsistent policymaking abroad, moving early and decisively domestically to be at the vanguard of green steel and other industries would give Oman the double benefit of onshoring more of the value chain while supporting the local green hydrogen industry.
A second option is a change in the structure of the Hydrom projects. In the Round 3 investor presentation, it is clearly stated that “phased execution is not permitted.”[42] However, starting at a smaller scale, like the ACME project, would make it easier to find an offtaker and reduce project-to-project risk – the chicken-and-egg problem where to have a market you need production, but you need production to have a market. The person involved in exporting hydrogen from Oman to Europe believed “That the second we start building the import infrastructure, more offtakers will be interested. There is currently an impasse in the hydrogen economy because there is no real market yet.” They believed that the market will grow rapidly once the first steps have been made, and in that scenario the capacity to rapidly build multi-gigawatt facilities will be vital, but phased construction may make the first steps easier.
A third option would be to set up a government subsidy body. This could take inspiration from either H2Global or India’s Power Finance Corporation and REC Limited. Such an initiative could remove some of the uncertainty from the nascent hydrogen industry and allow Oman to develop its supply chains at a more gradual level. However, Oman has only recently emerged from a serious budget deficit,[43] and may therefore be unwilling to put serious money into a largely unproven industry. This policy would also dramatically increase the opportunity cost of the hydrogen industry. At the moment the costs for Oman are concentrated in the human capital side, but subsidies big enough to make a difference for hydrogen developers could draw money away from other Vision 2040 priorities such as education, mining, and manufacturing.
So, what is the outlook for Oman’s hydrogen industry? In the short team, not great. Globally, governments are reducing their focus on the environment and spending more money on defence. Interest rates are up, making borrowing more expensive, and the prices of electrolysers have not come down as much as was expected a few years ago. In the medium term, stricter international laws on sustainable aviation fuels, the growing market for zero-emission shipping, and infrastructure being completed will grow the market for green hydrogen and ammonia. The steady stream of new investments in and adjacent to Oman’s hydrogen sector indicate that, despite headwinds, international interest remains. The country is indeed well-positioned to have a durable and important role in the global hydrogen value chain, and to balance out the trust deficit that exists in the hydrogen industry. The latter is key. Multiple interviewees highlighted that investors, developers, and policymakers have been burnt by hype cycles that promised much but delivered little. While Oman’s projects may be delayed, the fundamentals that make Oman attractive will not change: political support will remain, the wind will keep blowing, and the sun will keep shining.
Photo credit: Ryan Lackey, “Gas/oil storage at Sohar, Oman” (2007).
[1] https://hydrom.om/events/hydromlaunch/221023_MEM_En.pdf
[2] https://hydrom.om/events/hydromlaunch/221023_MEM_En.pdf
[3] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/low-emission-fuels/electrolysers#tracking
[4] https://oqgn.om/UploadsAll/Banners/1713772831500OQGNAR23_English_Version.pdf
[5] https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/cheap-secure-and-renewable-europe-bets-on-green-hydrogen-to-fix-energy-woes
[6] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-hydrogen-from-oman
[7] https://hydrom.om/Hydrom.aspx?cms=iQRpheuphYtJ6pyXUGiNqiQQw2RhEtKe#about
[8] https://decree.om/2023/rd20230010/
[9] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-hydrogen-from-oman
[10] https://oqgn.om/financial-information
[11] https://oqgn.om/financial-information
[12] https://edoman.om/financial-statements/
[13] The NEOM Green Hydrogen Company in Saudi Arabia is majority-owned by the Saudi government through ACWA and the Public Investment Fund, with Air Products holding a 33% stake. In the UAE, the hydrogen projects are being developed by a constellation of state-owned entities including Masdar and ADNOC.
[14] http://duqm.gov.om/upload/publications/duqm-quarterly-magazine-issue-40.pdf
[15] https://geo.om/about-us.php
[16] https://geo.om/news-details-01.php
[17] https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/what-we-do/bp-worldwide/bp-in-oman.html
[18] https://oq.com/en/investors/financial-statements-and-reports
In its initial stages, note that the project targets are reduced to 60 ktpa of hydrogen for 330ktpa of green ammonia.
[19] https://uae.edf.com/en/news/edf-group-to-drive-green-energy-production-in-oman-with-large-scale-green-ammonia-project
[20] https://www.act.is/2024/04/29/actis-fortescue-consortium-awarded-rights-to-develop-green-hydrogen-project-in-oman/
[21] https://shorturl.at/dL7h1
[22] https://scatec.com/2023/08/18/delivering-on-strategy-and-strong-progression-of-construction-activities/
[23] https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/yara-and-acme-signed-a-binding-agreement-for-supply-of-green-ammonia/
[24] https://omansustainabilityweek.com/newfront/news/omans-first-green-ammonia-project-begins-receiving-key-cargo
[25] https://acme-ghc.in/oman-project
[26] https://oqgn.om/UploadsAll/Banners/1745733940584AR%20%20E%20%2025.04.2025.pdf
[27] https://asyad.om/docs/default-source/default-document-library/sustainable-impact-disclosure-report-v4-2.pdf
[28] https://www.omanobserver.om/article/1179116/business/economy/vopak-plans-sizable-investments-in-new-energy-park-in-al-duqm
[29] https://energyoman.net/agreements-signed-for-liquid-hydrogen-corridor-partnership-with-royal-vopak
[30] https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Dec/Water-for-hydrogen-production
[31] https://inima.com/en/project/ghubrah-iii/
[32] https://hintco.eu/news/hintco-announces-eu-approval-of-second-h2global-auction-round-worth-up-to-eur-3-billion/
[33] https://hintco.eu/hpa-auctions/
[34] https://hintco.eu/lot-1-renewable-ammonia/
[35] https://www.iea.org/policies/28652-hydrogen-society-promotion-act
[36] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/about/programmes/cefim/green-hydrogen/2024-case-studies/Subsidy-scheme-Japan-case-study-2024.pdf
[37] https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso_seisaku/pdf/20230606_5.pdf
[38] https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-market-news/2573134-south-korea-h2-power-auction-excludes-some-nh3-projects
[39] https://www.yamna-co.com/south-korea-selects-a-bidder-in-the-first-clean-hydrogen-power-auction/
[40] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-11-05/business/tech/Korea-Power-Exchanges-bid-cancellation-exacerbates-concerns-about-clean-hydrogen-power-market/2436556
[41] https://www.carboun.com/leveraging-green-trade
[42] https://hydrom.om/PreviousRoundResults.aspx?cms=iQRpheuphYtJ6pyXUGiNqgnTvLaOi%2fEP
[43] https://www.mei.edu/publications/balancing-books-deep-dive-fiscal-policy-and-diversification-oman
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