ABSTRACT
Morocco’s rural areas are characterized by poor socioeconomic infrastructure, low levels of education, inadequate support services and an ageing farm population. Farmers are thus not equipped to face the challenges of an economy that is opening up to free market competition. The major causes of insufficient productivity in the agricultural sector according to Akesbi (2006) are:
production still hampered by climate constraints;
human resources constrained by poverty and illiteracy;
land structures unfavorable to modernization;
farms and production systems still low intensity;
insufficient and unevenly distributed financial resources;
dangerously deteriorating natural resources.
Indeed, the annual cost of environmental degradation due to desertification, erosion, salinization, forest fires, loss of agricultural production and peri-urban farmland, is considerable. The latest cost estimate by the World Bank in 2000 would reach the equivalent of 4.59 % of GDP. 4 Another World Bank report adds that: ‘the long-term sustainability beyond agricultural production has become more uncertain, because the crops have moved into marginal lands, deforestation has continued and industry tests the limits of water resources.’ 5 The origin of natural resource degradation is often linked to the poverty of the population, too dependent on natural resources alone for survival. In fact, in Morocco, poverty is particularly high in rural areas, a situation that is favorable neither to the protection of natural resources nor to human resources development.