(Souss Massa region as an example)
Profits for agro-export groups, exploitation for workers, and destruction for the environment
Agricultural workers, small-scale farmers, sailors, and pastoralists are the direct producers of food for the world’s population. They are also the most affected by the system of export, commercial and industrial agriculture, through the appropriation of land, water, seeds, markets, natural and financial resources by big capital, and the privatization of collective ownership.
It is the same result that emerges from the state’s agricultural policies in Morocco, embodied in the Green Morocco Plan 2008-2018, where a minority of large export capitalists, both local and foreign, benefit from public subsidies, expand their holdings, and increase their wealth. In contrast, small farmers are losing their land and resources and their incomes are shrinking.
The state has compiled an official ten-year account of the Green Plan to highlight the achievement of its main objective of increasing investment and exports through the plan’s first pillar of large agricultural clusters (Assembly) linked to exports. This outcome does not include the financial, social, and environmental costs, nor the consequences of increased food dependency that have resulted.
The Souss region of southern Morocco, as the pole of capitalist agricultural exports in Morocco, reveals that it is the big agricultural investors who have benefited from the “Green Plan” and have made surplus profits from the sweat of workers, especially female agricultural workers, who work in extremely harsh conditions of oppression and with miserable wages. This is in addition to their depletion and pollution of groundwater resources through the intensive use of chemical fertilizers, the destruction of the soil through monoculture and pesticides, and the uncontrolled disposal of toxic waste that kills the region’s environment.
This study comes within the framework of a collaboration between ATTAC Morocco and the Chtouka Ait Baha regional branch of the Democratic Syndicate for Agriculture, which belongs to the Federation of Democratic Trade Unions in the project “Building Alternatives to Transform the Food System: Political Education and Public Awareness on Food Sovereignty”.
Read the study in Arabic on: The Link
