Successive years of drought and encroaching desert have ruined large areas of the limited cultivable land in Mauritania. Subsistence agriculture, producing vegetables, millet, rice and dates, and livestock rearing supports over half the population, mostly in the area south of the Senegal River. The quantities produced are insufficient to meet domestic needs and Mauritania relies on imports of basic foodstuffs.
Fishing is vital both to sustaining the people and to the country's export income.
There are plans to exploit the country's copper reserves, which were long thought uneconomic. Offshore drilling for possible oil and gas deposits is also in progress. Nonetheless, Mauritania will be an exceptionally poor country for the foreseeable future, relying heavily on large quantities of foreign aid, most of which comes from the Arab countries. Its dependence was strikingly reflected during the 1991 Gulf War when the Government's declaration of support for Iraq caused several donors to withdraw promised aid. More recently, Mauritania has managed to secure some financial support from the IMF and World Bank in exchange for the standard economic reform programme.