Farming the Fault Line: Groundwater, Agriculture and Extractivism in a Southeastern Moroccan Dryland

My doctoral project is an ethnographic, textual and visual engagement with water, extractivism and the transformation of oasian agriculture in contemporary south-eastern Morocco. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin – one of the driest in the world – my study focuses on arid lands as places of adaptation that respond to their ebbing reserves of freshwater, as opposed to barren spaces, devoid of life and inhabitants, in dire need of being made productive. Indeed, the colonial administration regarded south-eastern arid lands as inutiles [useless]: strange and defective when compared to the French temperate, productive homeland, these ecologically marginal zones embodied environmental otherness. Together with their dwellers, they came to represent the unsavoury wilderness that the colonial enterprise sought to define itself against. Further, deserts – and oases within them – were imagined as “picturesque” - as the occluded from modernity, and as the objects of disenfranchisement, exoticization, and racism. Intervening in the longue durée of this representational history, my thesis focuses on how today, in the Drâa-Tafilalet, this colonial narrative of emptiness, aridity and waste is recast and operationalized in agricultural intensification and extractivist projects. In the contemporary version of the narrative, deserts become utopian sites of unexploited potential, from which a greener modernity can materialize by dint of technological innovation. And yet, deserts are not empty, and scarcity is not the only watery phenomenon to be reckoned with in the drylands. By following trajectories of water ethnographically in their most material, historic and affective forms, this work explores how human and non-human dwellers of the Drâa River Basin respond to long-standing climatic unpredictability and emergent socio-ecological pressures. Since the eighties, irrigation in oasian agriculture started to rely both on the khottara – an indigenous water management system designed to tap the groundwater table, a collectively owned rhizome of draining galleries, channels and wells – and on electric water pumps, which granted farmers individual access to groundwater. Over time, this shift engendered radical socio-ecological changes, both in human-plant and human-desert relationships: land surrounding the oases mushroomed with terres nouvelles – new cultivable plots, used either for intensive monoculture or as an extension of family farms, “created” in the “empty” desert plateaus by siphoning water out of deep boreholes. In the plateaus of the Middle Drâa Valley, these new lands sustain a government-funded, booming watermelon cultivation: dreams of (ground)water resources’ endless reproduction support conspicuous consumption as a way to perform class mobility, in a context where scarcity and excess coexist and shape each other. Indeed, my interlocutors often posited a distinction between l-fuq - the world above ground, where drought strikes-, and l-tht, the world below, where aquifer water lies in wait. For them, the underground functions as an infrastructural frontier, where hope can be found against its above ground fragility. Attempts at domesticating subterranean, unruly water flows also come in the guise of water grabbing practices that underscore extractivist ventures in the region, from the construction of the world’s largest Concentrated Solar Power plant and of the continent’s largest silver mine, to the large-scale cultivation of water-melons. To these, people respond by crafting non-normative subject positions as defenders of the khottara, by attempting at managing the aquifer and the land above it collectively. By focusing on how human and non-human life reckons with water scarcity, my ethnographic study engages with agricultural, political and ritual strategies deployed by the people of the Drâa river basin to carry on living among ebbing waters.