KENITRA, Morocco (AP) — Morocco’s golden wheat fields are no longer producing the same amount of wheat they once did. A six-year drought is endangering the country’s entire agricultural sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains to feed humans and livestock.
The North African nation expects this year’s harvest to be smaller than last year’s in both volume and area, putting farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to keep prices of basic commodities like flour from rising for everyday consumers.
“In the past, we had a bountiful harvest, a lot of wheat. But for the last seven or eight years, the harvest has been very low because of the drought,” says Al Housni Belhoussni, a small farmer who has long cultivated fields outside the city of Kenitra.
Belhoussni’s situation is familiar to grain farmers around the world who are facing a hotter, drier future. Climate change is threatening food supplies and reducing annual yields of the grains that dominate diets around the world: wheat, rice, corn and barley.
In North Africa, one of the regions considered most vulnerable to climate change, delays in annual rains and erratic weather patterns have shifted the growing season later in the year and made planning difficult for farmers.
In Morocco, where cereals occupy most of the cultivated land and agriculture employs the majority of rural workers, the drought is wreaking havoc and causing major changes that will transform the structure of the economy. It has forced some to leave their fields fallow. It has also made the areas they had chosen to cultivate less productive, producing far fewer bags of wheat to sell than before.
In response, the government announced restrictions on water use in urban areas — including public baths and car washes — and in rural areas, where water for farms was rationed.
“The late autumn rains affected the agricultural season. This year, only the spring rains, especially those in March, saved the crops,” said Abdelkrim Naaman, president of Nalsya. The organization has been advising farmers on planting, irrigation and mitigating drought, as rainfall is lower and rivers are flowing more slowly in Morocco.
The Agriculture Ministry estimates that this year’s wheat harvest will produce about 3.4 million tonnes (3.1 billion kilograms), well below last year’s 6.1 million tonnes (5.5 billion kilograms), a yield that was still considered low. The area sown has also declined significantly, from 36,700 square kilometres to 24,700 square kilometres.
Such a decline constitutes a crisis, said Driss Aissaoui, an analyst and former member of Morocco’s agriculture ministry.
“When we talk about a crisis, it means that we have to import more,” he explained. “We are in a country where drought has become a structural problem.”
By relying more on imports, the government will have to continue to subsidize prices to ensure that households and herders can afford basic products for their families and herds, said Rachid Benali, president of the agricultural lobby COMADER.
The country imported nearly 2.5 million tonnes of soft wheat between January and June. But this solution could have an expiry date, particularly because France, Morocco’s main source of wheat, is also facing a reduction in its harvests.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ranked Morocco as the world’s sixth largest wheat importer this year, between Turkey and Bangladesh, both of which have much larger populations.
“Morocco has experienced droughts like this and in some cases droughts that lasted more than 10 years. But the problem, this time in particular, is climate change,” Benali said.
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Hassan Alaoui contributed to this report from Rabat and Kenitra, Morocco.
