The labor of agrodiversity in a Moroccan oasis

Abstract

This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be ‘new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.

Keywords:

• agricultural biodiversity
• agrarian question
• food sovereignty
• labor
• Morocco
• peasant farming

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the National Science Foundation (award numbers 0920370 and 3048110665), and the Wenner–Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (award number 0920370). Thanks go to the research participants in the Mgoun valley, as well as Mohamed Ait Hamza, Lisa Cliggett, David Crawford, Katherine Hoffman, Hsain Ilahiane, Peter Kalliney, Tad Mutersbaugh and three anonymous reviewers for this journal for their comments on previous versions of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹This paper uses the term ‘agrodiversity' rather than the other commonly used term, ‘agrobiodiversity', following Brookfield et al.'s (2002) definition of agrodiversity as the ‘many ways in which farmers use the natural diversity of the environment for production. This includes not only their choice of crops but also their management of land, water, and biota as a whole', thus extending beyond plant-level biodiversity to the landscape level (Brookfield et al. 2002, 2; see also Brookfield 2001).

²This deactivation of pastoralists has historical roots in French colonial policies that contained pastoral movements and promoted the conversion of pastureland for cultivation, usually by colonial agribusiness or expatriate farmers in the more productive areas (see Davis 2007; Pascon 1980; Swearingen 1988).

³I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this phrasing.

⁴The research design followed McCabe (2004), who examines four Turkana (Kenyan) pastoralist households' livelihoods and herd management strategies in relation to macro-environmental, political and economic processes. The small sample size meant that he does not claim statistical representativeness. However, in amassing such a detailed data set about household decision-making, he is able to use quantitative data for a small sample to make definitive conclusions about the factors shaping livelihood decisions. This study used a similar approach to develop detailed portraits of different livelihood typologies for the case study households.

⁵Sharecropping is still practiced, though it is far less widespread and holds different political meanings. Because of the stigma historically associated with sharecropping, households sometimes avoid the term as they ‘take care' of land for relatives who have migrated away. Others, particularly immigrants into the valley, use the term (khmas) but are not indentured in the same way as previous generations and can negotiate or leave contractual arrangements.

⁶This fragmentation also deepened the sociability of farming. The ways people moved through space to access their plots created regular patterns of social intercourse throughout the growing season, as people worked alongside each other and often sang together to ease the burden of labor. See Ilahiane (2004, 204–05) for a discussion of the productive uses of fragmentation in another oasis context.

⁷Islamic inheritance practices do not necessarily produce an inexorable and irreversible process of fragmentation. Households used a number of strategies to maintain the size of their holdings, such as taking the decision not to divide land after the death of a patriarch or having one or a group of family members buy out the other heirs.

⁸It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the complex land-tenure regimes in the valley, but access to land was not always the overriding constraint for households limited in their farming options. Households could request access to collectively owned lands from village land representatives at no cost, but those without the labor and capital to develop them rarely submitted such requests for anything more than small plots in order to construct housing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Rignall

Karen Rignall is a cultural anthropologist. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Leadership Development in the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include land tenure, migration and political economy approaches to agrarian change in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on oasis farming in pre-Saharan Morocco.