Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0249/02490.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 35KB | 553 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02490}
$Pretitle{249}
$Title{Morocco
Chapter 3C.   Agriculture}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fadia Elia Estefan}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{land
percent
hectares
morocco
government
farmers
production
million
state
fishing}
$Date{1986}
$Log{}
Country:     Morocco
Book:        Morocco, a Country Study
Author:      Fadia Elia Estefan
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1986

Chapter 3C.   Agriculture

     Agriculture, including livestock, forestry, and fishing, has long been
a dominant sector of the Moroccan economy. In the early 1980s about 60 percent
of the population lived in the rural areas, and agriculture alone provided
employment for about half the nation's labor force. The contribution of
agriculture to GDP, however, has been declining somewhat, from an average of
22 percent in the late 1960s and early 1970s to 17 percent in 1983. It
was expected to decline further to about 16 percent in 1985 and to 14.8
percent by 1990. Agriculture's share of total exports has also declined,
from 54.1 percent in 1971 to only 28.6 percent in 1981. That decline,
however, was more a result of the increase in the share of phosphate exports
and of the EEC restrictions on foreign imports than of lower agricultural
production.

     The state has had an agrarian reform program since independence, but the
primary economic preoccupation of the government has been to increase the
agricultural output. Meeting the goals of land reform has been secondary.
Realistic land reform and balanced growth of the agricultural sector could
relieve Morocco of many serious economic and social problems. For example,
difficult living conditions in the rural areas and irregular employment have
caused a massive exodus from agricultural work by young people, who have
sought a more rewarding life in the cities and have ended up in the
bidonvilles, where public-order problems arise. In the mid-1980s the country
had a potential for self-sufficiency in the production of cereals, the staple
of the Moroccan diet. With proper development agriculture could do much to
alleviate the problems of the trade balance.

Land Tenure

     In the early 1980s there were a variety of land tenure forms, some
dating from the time before the protectorate period and rooted in concepts and
usages common to the Arab world. All land owned by the king or the central
government was called makhzan land. It included land in the public domain,
most forestland, all unused land and wasteland, and a considerable area of
arable land. Rights to unused makhzan land could be gained by improving
and utilizing it. The jaysh (tribes that traditionally had supplied the
government with military contingents) have had permanent usufruct of makhzan
land on a collective basis. Favorite court servants could also be given
usufruct of state-owned land.

     A small percentage of arable land and most of the grazing land were
collectively owned by tribes or clans. Individual members had leasehold rights
to a specific plot of collective land and constituted more than one-third of
all landowners in the country. Strictly private land was called melk land and
under Muslim Arab usage had to be worked or it was no longer treated as
privately owned land. Much melk land was worked under several forms of
sharecropping, except for irrigated land in government water-control projects,
which had to be owner-occupied. There were some renters of melk land, but most
tenants rented makhzan land or habus land (land donated to religious
institutions). Sharecropping of melk land generally was done under one of
three common methods. The most common system was called khammes, under which
the sharecropper received about one-fifth of the crop in return for his labor.
The landowner, who supplied the land and some of the inputs-sometimes even
clothing and food-received the remainder. Landlords under the khammes system
often worked part of the farm. Where the farm was owned by an absentee
landlord, the sharecropping system was called khobza. Several sharecroppers
worked the farm for the landlord and shared the crop in a fixed proportion.
Under the third sharecropping system, the sharecropper acted more as a labor
foreman. He provided a reliable work force for the farmer in return for a
share of the crop, usually one-fourth, and might or might not provide any
labor himself.

     Habus land was land donated under Islamic law to a religious institution
by the state or by an individual. If given by an individual, the land could
continue to be farmed by the family as long as there were male descendants of
the original donor. The family thus avoided payment of taxes on the land.
State land donated to the institution could be rented out to any farmer, as
could privately donated land where there were no longer male descendants.
Habus land was in principle inalienable, but during the protectorate period
the government permitted institutional holders to exchange or sell it in order
to acquire other property.

     Registered land, or ownership with a clear, registered title, was an
outgrowth of colonization. Although some registration of titles existed before
the protectorate, the local procedure was not adequate for the needs of
European settlers. Therefore, in 1914 the French introduced a system under
which registration of land became compulsory in cases where changes in
ownership involved non-Moroccans. Some Moroccan landowners, mainly those with
large farms, also had their land titles registered. Since independence the
extent of Moroccan-owned land with clear, registered titles has been augmented
both through the purchase by Moroccans of European-owned land and through the
expropriation and redistribution of foreign-owned land. The state has been
encouraging registration of melk, habus, and collective land, but the
procedures have been lengthy and costly. The land must be surveyed, boundaries
established, and public notice given to alert possible claimants. If no
counterclaims are filed within a fixed time, the land is registered in a land
book, and a title-deed is issued. All subsequent changes in ownership also
must be entered in the land book.

     Although large-scale colonization was discouraged in the early years of
the protectorate, settlers later began to arrive in large numbers, both with
and without assistance from the French government. By independence in 1956
there were nearly 6,000 European-owned farms totaling around 1 million
hectares, most of them in the fertile coastal areas around Fes, Meknes, and
Marrakech. At the outset the new government's approach to the problem took the
form of a number of restricted programs that met with only limited success.
The first was a series of land distributions beginning a few months after
independence in response to popular demands for the confiscation and
redistribution to landless peasants of the lands belonging to Europeans and
Moroccans who were considered to have collaborated with the French or to have
profiteered under the protectorate. Because of the resistance and political
power of large Moroccan landowners and Morocco's desire to maintain friendly
relations with France, only about 8,000 of the nearly 20,000 hectares
initially distributed were former colon (settler) lands; the remainder was
state land.

     Acceding to internal pressure, the government in September 1963 issued a
decree providing for the gradual government takeover of all European-owned
lands that had been received as grants under official colonization schemes
during the protectorate. Land that had been purchased privately by Europeans
was not affected by the decree. In March 1973 another decree made all
foreign-owned land (except urban property) the property of the state. Not all
the lands originally owned by foreigners were recovered by the state; an
estimated 296,400 hectares were said to have been sold to Moroccan farmers by
Europeans before the state could take them over. Such sales were subject to
regulations beginning in 1959 but continued su