This is the forth part of a series I am writing in honor of National Peace Corps Week. I served in Morocco from 2004 to 2006. In this diary I go into the lifestyle and some of the environmental issues that face the people in the community were I worked.
Part 1:Peace Corps History
Part 2: Peace Corps Morocco Programs
3: Beni Ourain
There are problems in Tazekka National Park. The park was formed in the 50’s to protect the cedars (Cedrus atlantica) on top of Jbel Tazekka, which at 1980 meters is the highest peak in the immediate region. At one time the cedars ranged over most of the Middle Atlas, but now are only found in isolated forests. In 1989 the park was expanded, and now includes several waterfalls, caves, corks oaks, holm oaks, and beautiful mountain and canyon landscapes. Currently the park holds a reserve for reintroducing Barbary sheep and Barbary deer. The Gouffre Friouato, thought to be the most extensive cave system in North Africa, is within the park. There are also contains several rural villages where many families continue to live and work.
View over a part of the Park.
There are no jobs in the villages, and there are none coming. The main source of income in the villages is raising livestock. Most families also own some land that they farm. Sometimes there are construction projects nearby where a man can get some wage work. For example, while I was there the road into my village was paved, and a lot of the men got paid working on that. They made about $5 a day doing that work. There is also some labor available at harvest working for some of the families with larger plots of land. For the most part, if a family has any cash income to speak of it is coming from outside the village, from a son who is in the army, or working in the city, or in the best circumstances working in Europe and sending money back.
The people grow wheat, but by the time they harvest it and get it processed and put aside what they will consume at home there isn’t much profit left. It is predicted that small wheat producers like these will be completely put out by the free trade agreement the Moroccan government got in exchange for joining the Coalition of the Willing anyway. The people also grow corn, which is mostly made into meal, and they grow garden vegetables. Almost all of the households grow staples such as potatoes, turnips, onions, or beans. These crops, along with bread, make up the majority of the people’s diet. Some of the families also own fruit and nut trees, especially walnuts, pomegranates, quinces, and olives.
Mother and daughter shuck beans.
Most families also raise some animals. These animals live almost exclusively by foraging. In the morning, they take the flocks out, and in the evening they bring the flocks home. There are no days off when you are a herder. There are also usually chickens, turkeys, mules, and/or donkeys. When the fields are laying fallow, the animals are taken there to eat the straw left by the wheat, or to eat the little bit of grass that grows up in the winter. While the animals are on the fallow fields eating, they are conveniently fertilizing the land. Many farmers allow nomadic herders to set up camp on their fields during that time of year in an ancient symbiotic relationship. In the summer when the crops are in the fields the animals are taken up into the hills to forage.
The lifestyle in Tazekka National Park evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years through trial and error, feasts and famines, droughts and floods, war and peace. Much of the hinterlands of Morocco that are occupied by Berber tribes have been nominally under control of the king for centuries, but in actuality for most of that time the crown has not exercised much real authority. The tribes served as the fiercest fighters in the wars against the Arab invaders, in the conquest and loss of the Andalusia, in the upheavals and internal rivalries of the aristocracy, and in the resistance to the French. The tribes also maintained rivalries with each other, which would turn violent in years that resources were scarce. It is believed that the Berber tradition of tattooing women’s faces developed during the long years of raids and fighting, so men could identify which tribe and clan a woman belonged to. I don’t imagine it was an easy life, but it is a hard land of mountains and desert, and while their existence was barbaric to the others, it was a system that allowed the generations to live on in that land.
Today fighting between villages is not allowed, most of the nomads have been forced to settle, and a cash economy has taken over. Knowledge has been lost because it is no longer economical to use the old labor intensive methods of production. In households that own many sheep, the people do not use that wool to produce clothing; they instead sell the wool and buy clothing. Cash is also needed to pay for butane for cooking and lighting, electricity, transportation, school supplies, and lists of other things that we consider necessities but they didn’t have to pay for just a generation or two ago.
Grandma making yarn, a dying skill.
The villages are putting too much pressure on the land. The climate is dry and getting drier, the native plants don’t regenerate themselves, and the people have to think about tomorrow at the expensive of 5 years from now. The people plow up and plant as much land as possible, to the very edges of their fields, leaving no buffer to control erosion. Trees are cut down for cooking and heating. I showed up there thinking myself green, but by the time February came I was trying to talk them into cutting down more trees for a bigger fire. It was cold. The people know that they cannot cut too many trees but the forest is the commons (and tragic). In Morocco, the national government owns all of the trees, and they are looked after by the Ministry of Water and Forests, an agency as incompetent, corrupt, and lazy as any in Africa. Those employed by the Ministry also realize that the people could not live without the wood, so much of it is taken.
A man carries a load of wood.
Whatever land isn’t destroyed by over farming and deforestation, the goats and sheep get. These animals are the true source of cash, so there are too many of them for the land to support. They eat everything at ground level. I have seen acres and acres of forest with absolutely no middle or under story. They climb the trees to get at the leaves. They move along riparian zones and eat up everything, leaving the streams to cut deeper and deeper into the land. As the land cover is destroyed, the soil is washed away in the heavy winter rains, leaving less and less to support the regeneration of the land each year.
Erosion in the Park.
And this is a National Park, remember; this is a land that has been internationally identified as unique and worth protecting. The conservation goals of the Park are in direct conflict with the subsistence of the people who live within the Park, and the people are winning out because they will not let their children starve no matter how much environmentalism you introduce. But in the long run, the people will be the losers as well, because as their lives stand they are tied to the land, and as resources run out it will only bring more and more conflict between the people there, and on a larger scale as the youth move to the cities to population shanty towns, as they do what they can to enter Europe, and as those that are left behind continue to be the have-nots, unable to participate in any of the advances mankind has made.
peacecorps.gov