The plant’s “initial aim was to process waste from fish freezing factories,” when the plant opened in 2005. They eventually moved on to processing fresh fish as the business grew over time, according to the company’s website.1 Mah El Turk was accused of violating Mauritania’s annual fishmeal production quota of 2,000 tons, producing 9,186 tons of fishmeal in 2017, as reported in a 2022 documentary produced by Arte TV.2 A 2025 article by the news site Le Quotidien de Nouakchott said that fishmeal factories in Mauritania such as Mah El Turk participate in a “system of predation”: “These companies use protected species such as sardinella (or “yaboy” in the language of Wolof), despite formal bans from the Ministry of Fisheries.”3
This plant relies partially on species that are unsustainable. Among the fish species processed by this plant are flat and round sardinella from Mauritanian coastal waters, according to a Fishery Improvement Project Tracking Database accessed in February 2025.4 In 2023, these two species were classified as “overexploited” in this area, according to the FAO.5 This means that fish are caught faster than they are able to reproduce, shrinking the population and reducing their capacity to recover to healthy levels.
In 2019, Mah El Turk joined the Mauritania small pelagics Fishery Improvement Project (FIP), a program that claims to help make participating fisheries more sustainable.6 Plants and their parent companies routinely use involvement in FIPs and other such programs as evidence of their environmental stewardship, even when participation in them does not result in actual improvement in the health of the relevant fishery. As of 2024, Mah El Turk remained part of the Fishery Improvement Project and the MarinTrust Improver Programme, despite the declining health of these species in the region.7 Subsequently, critics have questioned whether the Fishery Improvement Project makes genuine progress toward better fishery management or if it is merely a form of greenwashing.
Mah El Turk Sarl did not respond to a request for comment.8