Emblematic of the many initiatives unfolding under the New Green Revolution for Africa, the Moroccan government launched the Green Morocco Plan (GMP) in 2007, followed by the Green Generation Strategy (GG) in 2020, aiming to transform the agricultural sector into a key driver of economic growth and rural poverty reduction. However, these green modernisation schemes have exacerbated Morocco’s water crisis by promoting the overexploitation of already scarce water resources. This chapter first examines the inadequacy of these agricultural policies in relation to Morocco’s water resources, in order to outline the broader socio-ecological processes in which farmers are embedded and which they also participate in shaping. It then turns to farmers engaged in alternative agricultures, namely, agroecological farming at the margins of agribusiness and these modernisation schemes, which contribute to the (re)localisation of food and the (re)communalisation of social life. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research on alternative agricultures, the chapter sketches a panorama of subsistence and petty commodity producers and the strategies they deploy to sustain their livelihoods across different, yet increasingly thirsty, geographies—from the outskirts of Morocco’s major cities to its oases and mountains.

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Thirsty Landscapes: Morocco’s Green Agricultural Policies and the Struggle for Water at its Margins

  • Andrea Mathez

摘要

Emblematic of the many initiatives unfolding under the New Green Revolution for Africa, the Moroccan government launched the Green Morocco Plan (GMP) in 2007, followed by the Green Generation Strategy (GG) in 2020, aiming to transform the agricultural sector into a key driver of economic growth and rural poverty reduction. However, these green modernisation schemes have exacerbated Morocco’s water crisis by promoting the overexploitation of already scarce water resources. This chapter first examines the inadequacy of these agricultural policies in relation to Morocco’s water resources, in order to outline the broader socio-ecological processes in which farmers are embedded and which they also participate in shaping. It then turns to farmers engaged in alternative agricultures, namely, agroecological farming at the margins of agribusiness and these modernisation schemes, which contribute to the (re)localisation of food and the (re)communalisation of social life. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research on alternative agricultures, the chapter sketches a panorama of subsistence and petty commodity producers and the strategies they deploy to sustain their livelihoods across different, yet increasingly thirsty, geographies—from the outskirts of Morocco’s major cities to its oases and mountains.