By Cécile Raimbeau
As Morocco’s agriculture has developed to provide Europe with its fruit, vegetables and beauty oils, its women workers have lost out, with their farms engulfed by dams, and salaries which remain pitifully small. Before dawn in Douar Tamgoute el-Jadid on the edge of the town of Aoulouz, 26-year-old Kabira and 15 other Moroccan women pile into the back of a truck. They complain that they won’t get home again till around 8pm. After the first prayers of the day, these farm workers are transported, standing like cattle, in the backs of the vehicles that crisscross the Souss plain, to go and work for large-scale agricultural businesses, most funded by Moroccan capital (especially from the royal family) or by the French and Spanish. “We used to work in our own fields or our neighbours’,” the women say. “There was no need for the authorities. There were no conflicts between members of the community. But on these big farms, we don’t have the right to speak. If someone’s not working fast enough, the bosses insult them. In some places, employees get hit with sticks.” One of the farms in the area has such a bad reputation that it’s referred to as Guantanamo. The vast Souss plain stretches east from Agadir between the Atlas and Anti-Atlas mountains as far as Aoulouz.
The region is home to some three million people, 60% of whom are rural Amazigh (Berbers). For generations, their lives have been linked to the argan tree. These trees grow nowhere else on earth except in this region’s semi-arid climate, where they form a barrier against the encroachment of the desert. Since 1925, a law has recognised ordinary people’s right to exploit these publically owned trees; floods or rare rainfall enable them to grow wheat between the trees, graze their goats and harvest the fruits which fall in summer, from which they extract argan oil. But agricultural policy aimed at integrating Morocco into the world economy has pushed this type of family farming to the margins. Since the 1970s, according to Professor Najib Akeski of the Hassan II Agronomic and Veterinary Institute, the state has focused its attention and most of its expenditure on a few commercial growing and exporting areas, gradually giving up on the idea of food security. In 1985, under the guidance of the World Bank and the IMF, so-called structural adjustment programmes set in train the liberalisation of the agricultural sector. They paved the way for free trade agreements, especially with the European Union (see Why Morocco’s food is not secure), favouring the liberalisation of imports and the reduction of state spending on agriculture.
Some public or collectively owned land was given over to the private sector and investment sought from abroad. This was how the Souss plain became Morocco’s foremost fruit and vegetable growing area. It currently produces 685,000 tonnes of vegetables, including 95% of the country’s tomato exports, much of which is sold in France from October to June. Close behind is the citrus fruit sector, with an annual production of 666,000 tonnes, half of which goes overseas. Aziz Akhannouch, Morocco’s minister for agriculture, is also president of the Souss Massa Drâa region. He’s ambitious for his region, which he wants to see become “one of the most dynamic agricultural centres in the world” by 2015. Kabira doesn’t share his view, however. “Tomatoes, oranges,” she exclaims, “I’ve done them all!” When the Aoulouz dam was opened 18 years ago her family lost its farm beneath the water. She was still young at the time but she remembers having to move away and the bulldozers destroying their home. She remembers, too, resettling in Tamgoute el-Jadid and the pitiful compensation payment that was gone in a few months. Though only just an adult, she has had to work on big farms without a contract responding to the demands of the harvest cycle, earning 50 dirhams ($6) a day. The building of the dam meant numerous sources of water dried up and it was the peasants of Aoulouz who paid the price. History repeated itself in 2001 when the nearby Mokhtar Soussi dam was opened. “That year we worked at a loss because the harvest was so meagre. We got nothing from the olive trees either.
Most of us had to go and work somewhere else to survive,” says Driss Aakik, president of Aoulouz’s Poor Peasants’ Union, whose hundred or so families have to cope with poor harvests on parched land. The women who lead it organised a march in 2006 to reclaim their right to water and electricity, which resulted in charges being brought against them. The peasants regularly demonstrate against the government’s investment policy. The government “focuses on a few areas which get water from these big hydro projects,” complains Amal Lahoucine, an activist from the Moroccan Workers’ Union (UMT) in Taroudant. Encouraged by the World Bank, the policy of building major dams has created considerable disparities, according to Akesbi. The World Bank itself acknowledges that “more than 70% of state investment in agriculture goes to large irrigation projects, which bring relatively greater benefit to the better-off farmers and the larger-scale businesses.” In the meantime, thousands of small-scale farmers continue to produce on so-called bour (non-irrigated) land using archaic methods and without bank finance.
The UN Development Programme’s 2008 report showed that Morocco has slipped back three places in its ranking of human development since 2005, putting it 126th out of 177 nations. However much the government protests, you only have to travel around the country to see the lack of access to health care, water and education, which affects women particularly badly. One of Kabira’s neighbours, Khadija, who’s only 12, has been trying her luck with mandarins: “Normally we get paid every fortnight. But I started two months ago and I’ve only been paid once.” Her friend Thouraya, 16, has been working for the same company for a year and a half and hasn’t even seen a contract. The social security department sends every employee on its register a statement; Kabira was surprised to discover that out of the seven years she has worked, only three months had been declared by her employers. According to Lahoucine Boulberj, the UMT’s regional official responsible for agriculture, “only 15,000 out of 70,000 agricultural workers (70% of whom are women) in the region are officially declared. What’s more, lots of employers cheat on the number of hours they declare.” These practices mean the employer gets a high degree of flexibility from the workforce while the employees go without unemployment and pension contributions, paid holiday, insurance and sick pay. “We’re only just beginning to talk about work-related illness due to pesticide use,” Boulberj adds. “Unregulated use of pesticides is common here. As a general rule, the bosses tell people who are sick to come back when they’re better. Anyone who makes a fuss gets sacked. The right to unionise is only tolerated in some places.” The French firm Soprofel is one of the biggest agribusinesses in the region.
It distributes its tomatoes in France under the Idyl brand. “If we set up a union office, the management infiltrate it,” reported the delegates of the UMT and the Democratic Confederation of Work (CDT), who succeeded in leading a series of strikes and sit-ins in several of Soprofel’s farms in 2008. “We were only calling for our rights: to be officially declared, to have pay slips, to get recognition for overtime and access to health care. But the company abandoned farms one by one, put pressure on union members and then opened new ones elsewhere with new workers.” The UMT complains that agreements already signed with the union haven’t been implemented. Soprofel, which produced 75,000 tonnes of vegetables in Morocco last season, declined to comment. By taking advantage of the shortcomings of the Moroccan labour code adopted in 2004, several companies have sacked strikers, alleging they were “obstructing work”. Union officials of the Royal Domains of Chtouki (1) have denounced these sackings as merely a pretext in order to get rid of union members.
In Biougra, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) has reported cases of rape on farms. Its vice-president, Fatifa Sakr, who is a midwife by training, is concerned about the spread of Aids and sexually transmitted diseases. She underlines the vulnerability of female workers who travel alone or with their children from distant villages in the Mid-Atlas. “There’s no social housing,” she complains. “Some companies offer very insecure housing on the farm.” In the rural area of Aït Amira, in the douar (tented village) of Laarab, farm workers sleep in shelters made out of rubbish on a piece of waste land littered with filth. Oulhouss Lahoucine, president of the local section of the AMDH, reports that “delinquency and drug use have reached worrying levels”. The dusty road to this shantytown is desolate: broken greenhouses sit falling apart on the cracked soil among the dried-up argan trees. These are sites abandoned by the big companies. At el-Guerdane, nearly 3,000 hectares of orchard have been abandoned or grubbed up between 1995 and 2002 because the water supply has run out. A 90km water-feeder scheme is currently being constructed which will provide irrigation for the remaining citrus farms. This pipe will start from the Aoulouz dam and run alongside the dried-up fields of the poor peasants who don’t have any water. In spite of the savings they make on wages, irrigation costs reduce the profits of the big farms. “Most of them now have to pump water from a depth of more than 200 metres,” according to Abdelkrim Azenfar, the regional director of the water and forests department for the southwest. “That’s causing a drop in the level of the water table of around three metres a year.
The region’s annual water deficit has reached 240 million cubic metres.” He’s concerned that these businesses don’t seem to worry about the country’s future. After they have turned one place to desert, they do the same to another further south, perpetually in search of as much sunlight as possible: Guelmine, and Dakhla in the western Sahara are the new up-and-coming areas for hydroponic tomato production under glass. In addition to Soprofel, which has established itself in this desert, Azura, a Franco-Moroccan company, has 25 farms in Agadir and two in Dakhla. This company, whose products are sold on the market through Disma International, is forthcoming about its organic techniques to combat pests with beneficial insects (2), but makes no mention at all of the question of water availability.
In the Souss region, according to a report by the department of water and forests, this type of agriculture is already having a serious impact on the argan trees. This includes: “changes in social structures through the development of agriculture for profit, which benefits speculators and penalises local users; the death of trees as a result of soil erosion; and the drying up of the water supply.” As Benhammou Bouzemouri, national director for forest development, points out, argan trees contribute to the household income of peasant families to the tune of between 25 and 45%. Bouzemouri is worried about the consequences of a form of agriculture which has intensive water needs, and is also alarmed by the growing worldwide success of argan oil, extracted from the tree’s kernels, which increases the pressure on the forest: “In the long term, if nothing is done, the whole region could turn into a desert.” However, the commercial success of argan oil could contribute to the development of another part of the rural economy in the Souss region.
There are already more than 100 production cooperatives giving employment to around 4,000 women. The first women’s social enterprises that produced argan oil sprang up in the late 1990s, thanks in particular to Zoubida Charrouf, a chemist whose research had already confirmed the virtues of argan. Back then, oil production was a family affair and hardly anyone outside the forest region itself used the oil. Once they have been dried, the harvested fruits have their flesh stripped off to get at the nut, which then has to be struck between two stones in order to extract the kernel. The skill of the Souss peasants lies in this age-old practice: workers can produce a little over a kilo of kernels per day. And it then takes two-and-a-half kilos of kernels to produce a litre of oil. Argan oil appeared on the international market around 2004. “Big companies started talking about giving work and dignity to Berber women,” says Charrouf with some irony. In the space of a few years, middlemen multiplied, and Moroccan and European industrialists have set up small and large-scale processing facilities in Casablanca and Marrakesh, which are equipped with extractors able to provide the production capacity that exporters demand.
The cosmetics industry in Europe, the US, Canada and Japan is buoyant and argan oil has appeared in the beauty departments of supermarkets in an ever-growing range of products backed by big-budget marketing campaigns. However, there is no machine that can break these nuts properly. So most companies buy their kernels from wholesalers for a derisory sum, less than $11 a kilo. The wholesalers get them from peasants who, because of their isolation, don’t have the power to negotiate for the true value of what they are selling. The women of the cooperatives on the other hand earn at least $5.50 a day and benefit from other advantages such as literacy classes, childcare, and sometimes profit sharing, according to Tarâabt Rachmain, president of the National Association of Argan Cooperatives (Anca).
As a result of European cooperation, the majority of the 42 co-ops that are members of the association are equipped with electric presses. Nonetheless, they can’t measure up to the price war waged by the big companies: the production cost of a litre of oil from a cooperative, factoring in only the raw materials and wages, is at least $24.50. There are brands that sell for as little as $27 a litre in the supermarkets in Morocco, produced by companies which sell them for eight to 10 times more in Europe. The French entrepreneur Benoît Robinne has one of the prime positions in these companies. “We have two to three thousand female piece-workers. We deliver bags of argan fruits to them and pay them $7.20 a kilo [therefore per day] for their work cracking the nuts,” he said. However, Robinne was filmed by journalists from the Envoyé special TV programme in the souk with a sidekick who was carrying a suitcase full of banknotes to spend on bulk quantities of kernels. His company, Absim, produces 8-12,000 litres of oil a month, according to the factory director in Casablanca.
A co-op can’t produce more than 15 litres in that period. At the same time, given the pressure of demand, the argan forest, which covers some 820,000 hectares, is increasingly under threat, even though it has been recognised as a Biosphere Reserve by Unesco. “All the argan fruit is being collected. The forest no longer regenerates itself naturally. You even see people beating the trees to collect the fruit, damaging the flowers,” complains Adelfrim Azenfar. To make matters worse, the argan trees yielded almost nothing in 2008 as the result of a drought that has now become systemic. Unsurprisingly, the scarcity of raw materials made the price triple in the space of two months. Speculators built up stocks of the fruit to sell on at a high price to producers with supply contracts to fulfil. “Some cooperatives have stopped producing for lack of funds to buy in fruits,” says Rachmain. Even if the 2009 harvest is better, the situation can only get worse in the long term: planting schemes for argan trees, which only begin to fruit after ten years, won’t make up for the annual loss of around 600 hectares of forest. More than 7,000 hectares have been turned into agricultural land for greenhouses or field cropping.
And 9,000 more were sacrificed in 2006-7 for urban and tourist development. The agriculture minister has admittedly been making an effort to protect a product that is unique to his region. The creation of a Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) for argan oil from the Souss should help to maintain its added value. “Argan is the common name for the oil,” insist the women from the co-ops. But the word was trademarked in the 1980s by the French Pierre Fabre laboratories, which marketed an argan-based cream under that name. While the co-ops’ women are outraged, the Fabre company claims to be unaware that “its” trade name poses a problem. What’s more, there’s nothing at present to indicate that the PGI will protect the traditional or semi-mechanised cooperatives from the industrial-scale businesses that are able to negotiate tough contracts. Rather than encouraging the small producers, whether in agriculture or argan processing, the ministry’s policy is to give most support to investors and exporters: substantial grants are being offered to vegetable growers to invest in irrigation equipment designed to conserve water, and aid is also being given for industrial producers of argan oil to move into the PGI zone. Meanwhile, aid for co-ops is limited to consolidating the existing fragile structures rather than creating new businesses.
And so the new Okhowa co-op in Taroudant has received neither machines nor aid. Malika, a young women whose farm was destroyed by one of the Aoulouz dams, has nothing to depend on except the motivation and solidarity of her 30 or so fellow co-op members. “We’re sick of working for the big farms,” most of the women say. The women of the Union of Poor Peasants of Aoulouz would also like to set up a cooperative. But they lack the means. “What else can we do?” they wonder. Goat rearing isn’t the answer. The advancing desert is pushing the nomads from the south into the argan forest with their flocks. The forest is already suffering from over-grazing. Family farms, argan production and animal husbandry are the three traditional resources of the Berber peasants of Souss Massa Drâa. These activities maintained a small rural economy, which assured food security, in spite of methods that were bound to change. The Amazigh culture is also disappearing. Kabira expresses her concern with a gesture: miming a plane flying overhead towards Europe, she says “Here, walou! Nothing.”
Submit your article, poem or story for publication.
