This is Part One of a two-part series. Read Part Two here.

Ahmed and I walk past the rusted, dismantled jumble of an old water pump that lies like a decaying animal carcass in a nearby field. “It broke,” he says, averting his eyes and continuing down the rock-strewn road towards the riverbed. As we cross the rocks of the wadi, polished smooth in pre-history by a now-phantom river, he looks back briefly. “They’re always trying to fix it,” he says, as if he wants to apologize for the failures of mid-20th century metallurgy. “Has it ever worked?” I ask him. “Never. It’s always junk.”

We are in an oasis shadowed under a small range of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. Ahmed’s home village. It’s a small town, beautiful in the rusticated sort of way all small towns are beautiful. The buildings are made out of compact mud and straw, painted white on the inside, camouflaged by their plain brownness on the outside, in little contrast to the reddish-brown color of the mountains that burnishes golden when graced with the glow of the setting sun.

Modern conveniences, like plumbing, toilets, and light switches, seem especially out of place here. Wearing his thick djellaba to ward off the cold, Ahmed’s toothless father ambles out the door to the droning of the muezzin’s call to prayer, his silhouette disappearing down the well-trodden path to the wadi. His brother, Mohammed, who communicates in smiles, returns with a bundle of firewood from above the hilltop scree. The old women curse him for his tardiness and begin baking the evening’s bread in a ritual they complete every night. The youngest daughters, unmarried and hair uncovered, return laughing from their frolics in the olive groves.

These idylls continue to putter along with the resolve of a Mercedes-Benz grands taxi. From the first century to the 21st, against history, against everything, the continuity of tradition has survived – even if only here, where modernity’s corrosive influence holds little sway. But like the mirages that surge upon the golden-baked dust of the Saharan plain, the desert of the Anti-Atlas conjures an image far more seemly than the reality it belies.

Climate change is destroying the delicate ecological balance. Job opportunities are shifting north. The youth are leaving to find a better and more urbane life. Crumbling kasbahs mourn their lost sons. The villages are dying, and with them, there perishes the heritage and the history of two thousand years. There seems to be neither will nor ability to change this existential race for the bottom.

However, reports on the death of the Anti-Atlas have been greatly exaggerated. Like the seed of grain which must die before it brings forth life, the very bleakness of the Anti-Atlas is attracting the attention of some very powerful friends. What they’re planning will amount to the most ambitious rural renewal project ever attempted: the construction of the world’s largest and most powerful solar power plant. For a people without a future, it may represent the brightest path forward in decades.

The bright lights of the city are, for the young at least, a universal and irresistible attraction. A beacon in the darkness, a flame for the world’s million flittering moths, the promise of renewal in its baptismal font has drawn students, workmen and women, thieves, murderers, and every turtle on down into its orbit. To grow, to live, to be – all are actions of a greater weight in the urban atmosphere. Every libidinous impulse reaches its apotheosis, every beginning its end.

Where the seasonal rains declare whether the year has gone bust or flush, and the muezzin dictates the pace of experience, change is not in the air. It is in the soil. Without rain, there is no agriculture, and without the seasonal growth cycle, the soil becomes dust and is reclaimed by the desert. In a country where nearly 50 percent of jobs are in agriculture, and where human development is lowest in the most rural places, this incipient decline has meant the future, complete collapse of agriculture in the south.

And so, in waves and in droves, the youth are fleeing for the bright lights of Casablanca, Paris, Fez, Marrakech, Brussels, Rabat, Tangier, Amsterdam. As the villages empty, the desert cities of Ourzazate and Zagora burst at the seams with new arrivals, who pile into the smoke-filled cafes and squat in the windowless rooms of construction sites. They come for fresh experiences, for Western luxuries, but above all, for the new opportunities they’ve abandoned their childhood homes to seek.

The change has been a long time in coming, though today it appears so stark. While rural communities grew at the snaillike rate of 0.8 percent between 1994 and 2004, the urban areas in their region exploded by 3.1 percent. In the 16 years between 2004 and 2020, the populations of Ourzazate and Zagora are projected to grow by 22 percent, outpacing most other urban centers in the nation in terms of relative increases.[1] Though the conurbations of the desert receive the lion’s share of growth, many Moroccan youth are following in the footsteps of the two-million-strong Moroccan diaspora and departing for Europe’s more prosperous climes.[2]

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In the setting sun, a Moroccan agadir looks even more glorious. ©Global Heritage Fund/David Goeury

What they leave behind often does not survive, or at least, does not survive intact. Old toothless patriarchs and matriarchs eke out a hermetic lifestyle on their children’s remittances, ancestral olive groves lie fallow for the first time in centuries with no one to tend them, and the planned ecosystems for managing the land’s scarce resources wither without the careful (and skilled) management they require. As the heritage of thousands of years of Berber culture crumbles in the desert heat, it seems, for the first time in millennia, the proud spirit of this hardy mountain people has been broken.

For, since Phoenician civilization first made its mark in the shrouded years of antiquity, these denizens of the high desert have defined themselves by the squabble: Whose land? Whose family? Whose trade route? Whose wadi? Answers as numerous as the people themselves have been proposed: family ties evolved into tribal ones as urbanized Arab sultans assimilated the lowland peoples and waged war with the highland tribes. Tribes became confederations as Carthaginians, Numidians, Romans, Umayyads, Abbasids, and scores of successive empires bidded for control. Territory superseded genetics and genetics superseded territory when Saadiens fought Sufis fought Ait Atta and back again. Religion battled religion and then sect devoured sect.

Every new answer to the perennial question – to use a cliché – has proven as shifty as the sands it is built upon. But amidst a history of constant inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and inter-tribal struggle, the Berbers maintained a golden thread of continuity between their past and their present. From Rome to now, they have been defined by an island of stability: agriculture. And it is with agriculture that this sad story merits its gloomy explanation.

[1] Christoph, M., Fink, A.H., Paeth, H., et al., The societal framework of water management and strategies of livelihood security. In: Speth, P., Christoph, M., Diekkrüger, B. (Eds.), Impacts of Global Change on the Hydrological Cycle in West and Northwest Africa. Springer, Heidelberg (2010): 308-309

[2] De Haas, Hein. “Morocco’s migration transition: trends, determinants and future scenarios” Migration and Development Revisited (2005): passim

The rain-kissed lands of the Atlas are dry, and the earth cries out to heaven for the missing waters. Atop the crunchy dunes a yeoman shepherd prowls, shorn of his staff and his rod, his eyes ranging over the heads of sheep covering the land like cut grass, over the olive trees spilling their fruits on the ground like rivers of blood. Things just aren’t the same here, anymore.

In the Atlas, the sporadic nature of precipitation – some years the desert is inundated, others it withers in the sun – has required an often unyielding compromise. Warring groups must make peace with each other, and with the land, to survive.

And so they have. Settling their communal roots near underground water sources and along dry riverbeds, the tribes developed complex socio-ethnic hierarchies centering on the management of land, water, and agriculture. These oases served as “commercial and migratory junctions,” displaying the influences of multiple groups in a blend of “Sub-Saharan, Berber, Arab, and Jewish influences,” that supported an astonishingly cosmopolitan rural environment[1]:

  • Water rights. Water rights are generally held in private, though their apportionment is for the benefit of the common weal: depending on whether they are in the mountains or the valleys, farms would either receive their allotted water at certain times, called nouba, or be given it in order of location.
  • Communal land. Those who own neither land nor water rights are given access to the Tamazight or village land, where they may graze their livestock or plant their crops.[2]
  • Desert plants. Plants are chosen to maximize the limited resources. Barley is traditionally preferred over wheat due to its lower water consumption and its faster ripening time. Grain is not squandered but stockpiled in communal granaries called igoudar when the years are flush
  • Efficient resource management. Fields are surrounded with apple, walnut, almond, olive, and date orchards to use the available water with greater efficiency
  • Livestock is herded from place to place in search of the rain in a system called transhumance
  • Kinship networks. Strong kinship networks and reciprocal arrangements within the tribe itself offset any shortages that may develop.[3]

It was a harmonious system, and so, like all things that come about in the whirligig of the Atlas, it was bound to change.

In 1912, France declared Morocco a protectorate and wasted little time in pillaging the land for its mineral and agricultural wealth. Thousands of French settlers, or colons, poured into the country and took up prominent positions in local industry, transforming it from a backwater into a plantation-cum-mine. Transportation networks crisscrossed the developed hinterlands of the countryside, uniting the established cities of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts with their inland cousins while cutting off the highlands, the mountains, and the trackless wastes of the Sahara.

The activity of the French settlers was so ceaseless, and so targeted, it had left Moroccan infrastructure both hideously imbalanced and dangerously centralized. In an arrangement blithely referenced in the divide between Maroc utile, “useful Morocco” and Maroc inutile (“useless Morocco”), the rich lands of the lowland plains and the coast were expropriated, pillaged, developed, or improved, while the mountains became the homes of rebels and brigands and thus targets for subjugation. After being conquered in a 20-year-long military campaign,[4] they remained untouched: oases continued to flourish and arable land was held under tribal control. Soon, the tribal economy of these unwieldy mountain dwellers could not compete with the mechanized and near-Western advancement of their more docile brethren.

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A crumbling hill fort against the sky in the Anti-Atlas, Morocco. ©Global Heritage Fund/Amar Grover

The disarray this caused cannot be overstated, for when the French departed in 1956, the renascent Moroccan government “inherited the political-military infrastructure”[5] they installed and not only failed to remand, but even extended, their colonial overlords’ policies to every inch of their state for the first time in recorded history. In areas of historical discontents, such as the Rif Mountains, the eastern range of the High Atlas, and the coast around Agadir – all strongholds of Berber civilization – mass migration was highly encouraged to act as a “safety valve” against insurrection and dilute their political power. [6]

The hands-off policy of the French with regards to Berber land was rescinded, and the Moroccan government created a conflicting web of jurisdictions as the communal land was nominally divvied between to a centralized bureaucracy of institutions, territorial bodies, and officials, known as Qaids. Nominally, because the many attempts of the government towards land reform failed in the face of an intransigent public. The tribes continued to defer to their own institutions, whether they held formalized political power or not, and decisions on land held in common continued to be made by the tribesmen themselves.

The divergence between ecological reality, communal decisions, and government policy has resulted in a complete failure to prepare for a changing climate. Despite the lack of cooperation from the villagers, the government shifted its policy to favor newer means of agricultural production that would increase yields and reduce dependency on cereal imports. The national grain shifted to wheat, which has since become a cash crop, and peasants have been encouraged to commandeer previously communal rangeland to accommodate the thirsty grain. Traditional livestock husbandry has suffered as a result. To feed the growing industry, water rights were seized from local people and invested in the national government, making traditional water management systems untenable.

While this brought growth and prosperity to some, it came at a price to others. Tribal structures atrophied and then fractured in response to the twin demons of government subsidies and land seizures while greater economic output led to larger herds and increased degradation of the land. Over a third of Moroccan farms now suffer from salinity problems, which stem from the acute reduction in groundwater resources. Due to the growth in herd size and the corresponding reduction in vegetation cover and forest area, 75 percent now suffer from erosion.

And things are only bound to get worse. In a country where nearly 50 percent of the workforce is involved in agriculture, [7] rainfall is projected to decline by up to 30 percent by 2050.[8] The biggest losses will occur in the economically vulnerable south, [9] turning to desert what was already an arid and mismanaged land.[10] With an agricultural sector that depends heavily on seasonal rainfall and depleted irrigation sources, this will lead to between a 29 and 39 percent decrease in production. There will be large population shifts as disenfranchised residents decamp for the comparatively wet coastline.

This is the new reality: North Africa will be a region of increasing water scarcity, decreasing water quality, heavy agricultural stress, across-the-board economic contractions in GDP, and hostile conflicts over ever-shrinking resource streams.[11] All of this in a country that performs at the bottom for economic resources, human development, health, and education.[12]

Future generations of Moroccans will bear the harshest burdens of climate change. But today’s crop of bright young things hasn’t waited for the other shoe to drop. They’ve already left the oases of their ancestors far behind.

[1] De Haas 9

[2] Christoph, M., Fink, A.H., Paeth, H., et al., The societal framework of water management and strategies of livelihood security. In: Speth, P., Christoph, M., Diekkrüger, B. (Eds.), Impacts of Global Change on the Hydrological Cycle in West and Northwest Africa. Springer, Heidelberg (2010): 306-311

[3] Schilling, Janpeter, Korbinian P. Freier, Elke Hertig, and Jürgen Scheffran. “Climate Change, Vulnerability and Adaptation in North Africa with Focus on Morocco.” Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 156 (2012): 14-20

[4] de Haas 23

[5] de Haas 23

[6] de Haas 23-27

[7] Ibid. 16-17

[8] Ibid., 14

[9] Christoph, M., Fink, A.H., Paeth, H., et al., Impacts of Global Change north of the Sahara. In: Speth, P., Christoph, M., Diekkrüger, B. (Eds.), Impacts of Global Change on the Hydrological Cycle in West and Northwest Africa. Springer, Heidelberg (2010): 24

[10] Christoph, M., Fink, A.H., Paeth, H., et al., 2010. Climate scenarios. In: Speth, P., Christoph, M., Diekkrüger, B. (Eds.), Impacts of Global Change on the Hydrological Cycle in West and Northwest Africa. Springer, Heidelberg: 402–425.

[11] Ibid., 16

[12] Ibid. 17