Crucial farming jobs dry up in drought-hit Morocco July 15, 2024

A man inspects his damaged crops in the Moroccan town of Sidi Slimane after six years of drought (FADEL SENNA)

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Crucial farming jobs dry up in drought-hit Morocco

Ismail BELLAOUALI

In a sunny village north of the Moroccan capital Rabat, Mustapha Loubaoui and other itinerant workers wait idly by the roadside for agricultural jobs that have become scarce due to a six-year drought.

Loubaoui, 40, drove his combine harvester for 280 kilometers (175 miles) in the hope of finding work in what used to be the prosperous farming village of Dar Bel Amri.

His one-day journey was in vain. Now, Loubaoui fears he will end up like the 159,000 or so Moroccan agricultural workers who, according to official figures, have lost their jobs since the beginning of last year.

"Work has become difficult to get because of the drought," Loubaoui told AFP.

Large areas of the Mediterranean have been under "drought alert conditions", a phenomenon even more pronounced in Morocco and its neighbors Algeria and Tunisia, according to the latest analysis by the European Drought Observatory.

In Morocco, the lack of water threatens the viability of the important agricultural sector, which employs around a third of the working-age population and is responsible for 14% of exports.

More than a third of Morocco's total cultivated area is unused because of the drought.

Currently, the area is around 2.5 million hectares, compared to four million before the onset of the severe water shortage, according to figures provided by the Minister of Agriculture, Mohammed Sadiki.

And as arable land has shrunk, so has employment.

Unemployment rates in the North African kingdom rose to a record 13.7% in the first quarter of 2024, said the High Commission for Planning (HCP), the government's statistical body.

The body said that 1.6 million of Morocco's 37 million people are unemployed and stressed that "the labor market continues to bear the brunt of the drought."

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Among the people behind the statistics is Chlih El Baghdadi, a farmer who lives near Dar Bel Amri.

His grain harvest suffered a huge loss due to the drought, which left him sitting at home instead of working in his fields.

He and his five children now depend financially on his wife, who works on a larger farm near Meknes, about 70 kilometers from their village.

These operations, whose production is mainly for export, survived the drought due to their water-intensive irrigation systems, employed in the "Green Morocco Plan" (PMV) launched in 2008.

Since then, agricultural revenues have doubled from 63 billion dirhams to 125 billion dirhams ($12.5 billion) in 10 years, according to official figures.

Another program, "Generation Green 2020-2030", aims to improve Morocco's sustainable agriculture in light of climate challenges.

It aims to double agricultural exports to reach 60 billion dirhams by 2030.

However, unemployment caused by climate change has not decreased despite the initiatives.

"We have modern, sophisticated agriculture, but it only covers around 15% of arable land," said Abderrahim Handouf, a researcher and agricultural engineer.

The "majority of farmers remain at the mercy of climate change" and other economic sectors "are not able to accommodate them", he added.

-'Employment is the weak point'-

The kingdom has strived to develop its industrial and service sectors over the past two decades to create more jobs, but this has not compensated for climate-related unemployment.

Cars, for example, led Morocco's exports last year, with a record value of more than 141 billion dirhams.

But the sector "only creates up to 90,000 jobs a year", while 300,000 people are looking for work, Moroccan industry minister Ryad Mezzour said in May.

"Employment is the weak point of the economic system," he said in a radio interview.

Faced with criticism, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch told parliament last month that "the drought has become a reality".

He announced that 140,000 new jobs were expected to be created as part of investment deals worth 241 billion dirhams in areas such as renewable energy, telecommunications, tourism, and health.

But the figures were far from the million jobs he had promised to create by 2026.

For farmers like Benaissa Kaaouan, 66, it's too late. He said he would have given up farming if he had learned another skill.

Now he stands in the middle of his zucchini fields in Dar Bel Amri, most of them spoiled by the sun.

"There is no life without rain," Kaaouan said sadly.

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