KENITRA, Morocco (AP) — The golden fields of wheat no longer produce the wealth they once did in Morocco. A six year drought It has endangered the country’s entire agricultural sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains used to feed humans and livestock.
The North African nation predicts this year’s harvest will be smaller than last year’s in both volume and acreage, leaving farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to keep the price of staples like flour rises to daily consumers.
“In the past, we used to have a reward – lots of wheat. But during the last seven or eight years, the harvest has been very low because of the drought,” said 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 face a hotter, drier future. Climate change is putting the food supply at risk and declining annual yields of the cereals that dominate diets around the world – wheat, rice, corn and barley.
In North Africa, among the regions considered most vulnerable to climate change, delays in annual rainfall and inconsistent weather patterns have delayed the growing season until later in the year and made planning difficult for farmers.
In Morocco, where cereals represent the majority of cultivated land and agriculture employs the majority of workers in rural regions, the drought is wreaking havoc and triggering major changes that will transform the makeup of the economy. It forced some to leave their fields fallow. It has also made the areas they choose to farm 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 in Public bathrooms and car washes – and in rural areas, where water going to farms has been rationed.
“Late rains during autumn affected the agricultural season. This year, only spring rains, especially during the month of March, managed to rescue the harvests,” said Abdelkrim Naaman, president of Nalsya. The organization advised farmers on sowing, irrigation and drought mitigation as less rain falls and less water flows through Morocco’s rivers.
The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that this year’s wheat harvest will yield about 3.4 million tonnes (3.1 billion kilograms), much less than the 6.1 million tonnes (5.5 billion kilograms ) from last year – a yield that was still considered low. The amount of land sown also decreased drastically, from 14,170 square miles (36,700 square kilometers) to 9,540 square miles (24,700 square kilometers).
Such a drop constitutes a crisis, said Driss Aissaoui, an analyst and former member of the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture.
“When we say crisis, it means we need to import more,” he said. “We are in a country where drought has become a structural problem.”
Relying more on imports means the government will have to continue subsidizing prices to ensure families and livestock farmers can buy basic foods for their families and livestock, said Rachid Benali, president of agriculture lobby COMADER.
The country imported almost 2.5 million tons of soft wheat between January and June. However, such a solution may have an expiration date, especially as Morocco’s main source of wheat, France, also faces declining harvests.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations ranked Morocco as the world’s sixth-largest importer of wheat this year, between Turkey and Bangladesh, both of which have much larger populations.
“Morocco has seen droughts like this one and, in some cases, droughts that lasted more than 10 years. But the problem, especially this time, is climate change,” said Benali.
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Hassan Alaoui contributed reporting from Rabat and Kenitra, Morocco.
