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WATER POLITICS

Via Bloomberg, a report on how Morocco’s unrelenting dry spell is ushering in record wheat imports and risking fruit and vegetable sales abroad:

Mohamed Sadiri has farmed the same 3 hectares in western Morocco since 1963, and he’s never seen the land this parched.

Wheat yields plummeted last year to 1 ton per hectare (2.5 acres), his smallest harvest ever, as the worst drought period in three decades envelops the North African nation. The 25-foot-deep well on Sadiri’s plot dried up, and he can’t afford to dig any deeper. So now he’s trying barley, a more resilient crop.

Sadiri is among 1.2 million grain farmers suffering the brunt of climate change in Morocco, where the frequency of droughts has quintupled this century. The impact will ripple far beyond its borders: The country stands to bring in record volumes of wheat — at a time when major shippers like France and Russia are suffering harvest setbacks of their own — and less of its fruit and vegetables will line store shelves in Europe, the US and the rest of Africa.

“We haven’t had a good year since 2000, and the last three years were the worst,” Sadiri, the 77-year-old farmer, said under a relentless sun and hot wind raising billows of dust in Ezzhiliga. “All we can do now is pray for God’s mercy.”

Authorities project the current wheat harvest will be less than 2.5 million tons — far below what the national budget is predicated upon and the kingdom’s lowest since the global food crisis of 2007. Imports will be threefold that amount, the US government forecasts, a fifth season in six that production has trailed purchases.

The longevity marks a stark shift in Morocco’s ability to supply its people with food staples and will add to expenditures just as the government faces a 120 billion dirham ($12 billion) reconstruction bill after September’s deadly earthquake. It’s also spending 20 billion dirhams to upgrade soccer stadiums for a 2025 African championship and the 2030 World Cup.

And the situation stirs memories of the Arab Spring a decade ago, when climbing food prices contributed to uprisings across the region. Although its neighbors are facing better grain yields this year, Egyptian crops suffered from extreme heat and Algeria and Tunisia grappled with drought in 2023.

“Farming is living a tragedy — especially grains,” said Abderrahim Handouf, a researcher at the state-run National Institute of Agricultural Research. “We will be importing more wheat over the short-to-medium terms because fixing the situation will require lots of time.”

Successive droughts have deflated Morocco’s annual production of wheat, durum wheat and barley to 3 million tons versus 10 million tons in a wet season three years prior, said Michael Baum, acting deputy director general of the nonprofit International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas.

The situation is no more promising for farmers planting the tomatoes, bell peppers, strawberries and olives that fill supermarket aisles abroad. El Guerdane, the biggest irrigated farming area at 10,000 hectares, has been without water since November amid a sharp drop in reserves held by most of the kingdom’s major dams.

Authorities have been restricting exports of onions and potatoes to West Africa to help push prices down.

Grain plantings were reduced to 2.5 million hectares this year, compared with 4 million hectares in recent years, Agriculture Minister Mohamed Sadiki told lawmakers in April.

“The droughts have become more frequent and more severe,” Baum said.

They’re also fueling food inflation. The price of durum wheat has soared 85% since 2020, said Ahmed al-Amri, a board member of the Riham cooperative in the Fes-Meknes region, one of the biggest producers.

Morocco is a primary buyer of French grains, spending €562 million ($602 million) last year, according to the FranceAgriMer crops office. Milling-wheat futures traded in Paris reached a one-year high in May, before easing.

The harsh weather exacerbates what already is a gaping income disparity between urban and rural areas. An estimated 200,000 jobs were lost in the countryside last year, fueling a jump in the national unemployment rate to 13%.

Two-thirds of the grain farmers work on plots smaller than three hectares. Most of them don’t own a tractor; can’t afford seeds, fertilizer or pesticides; don’t have access to financing; and don’t get much training in alternative planting techniques, Handouf said.

“Farming cereals has become synonymous to misery in the Moroccan countryside,” he said.

The nation is working on adaptations. It’s pushing a program to use conservation tillage on 1 million hectares by 2030 — a technique that could boost yields by about 30% while preserving the soil’s fertility and moisture.

About 100,000 hectares are covered so far.

The Rabat-based Royal Institute for Strategic Studies said public programs in recent decades “have not served rain-fed farming fairly,” instead providing large subsidies for irrigated areas that didn’t control their water consumption.

It recommended prioritizing supplies to the small farms that “contribute to national food security” — i.e., feed the people to avert any potential for unrest.

“Moroccan agriculture finds itself in an unprecedented critical situation,” the organization, created by royal decree, said in a February report.

The agriculture ministry didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

Meanwhile, the drought hurts a program spearheaded by King Mohammed VI to boost women’s participation in the economy. For two months, Aicha Ouachou and 10 female coworkers didn’t buy any durum wheat to make the couscous that earned their Woman and Work cooperative a government prize.

That’s because the grain being offered was too expensive and of poor quality, she said. The price reached 7,300 dirhams a ton this year, compared with about 4,000 dirhams when the co-op opened in 2014.

The women only earn about 500 dirhams a month, and most of them are the sole providers for their families.

“I just can’t wrap my mind around what happened,” Ouachou, 69, said inside co-op headquarters in the central Beni Mellal region, the nation’s poorest.

In Sadiri’s case, he earned about 10,000 dirhams from selling wheat during what he called a “good year.” That’s still less than a third of the national minimum wage.

This year, he pivoted to barley to avoid “tiring the soil” and harvested nine tons. That was just enough to feed his family and cover expenses until he plows again in the fall.

Sitting around a spread of wholewheat bread, butter, jam and mint tea, Sadiri talked about how much his village has changed since the 1980s, when there was no electricity, telephone lines or schools — but plenty of rain. Now it has the former but lacks the latter.

“Everything is available except water to drink and to farm,” he said. “We need water.”