| By Yossef Ben-Meir Marrakech |
| It is uncommon to implement development projects with only positive impacts on everyone affected. For example, even advancing communities’ sustainable agriculture by cultivating local seed varieties with enhanced irrigation efficiency still raises the price of land due to increasing revenue, making it more difficult for family farmers who rent their land to achieve the same yield for the amount they pay. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of property titles worldwide are held by men, so agricultural development can actually further stratify gender-based income inequality. However, certain water projects have the outcome of making the lives better for everyone impacted. Expanding access to clean drinking water in rural places diminishes infant mortality and water borne diseases and is a key action toward enhancing girls’ participation in education who no longer have to fetch water long distances. Terracing the extensive mountain ranges, from valleys’ riparian areas to summits, and retaining water on elevated plateaus is a seriously underutilized community activity to reverse Morocco’s water plight. It captures or slows the runoff of precipitation and spring water at higher elevations, increasing infiltration. Doing so also creates new plots for equitable agriculture and majorly reduces mountain and soil erosion. By retaining water high within the watershed, these measures can transform episodic rainfall into longer-lasting water resources during prolonged dry periods for mountain communities and downstream regions. Water scarcity in Morocco is dire, and the increasing likelihood of a deepening crisis is real. Over the past eight years, Morocco has faced an exceptionally acute and prolonged drought, transitioning from relative water abundance to structural water scarcity. A sequence of particularly harsh years between 2019 and 2025 severely depressed agricultural output, depleted reservoirs, and accelerated groundwater drawdown. Per capita renewable water availability has plummeted from around 2,500–2,600 m³ in the 1960s to approximately 600–620 m³ today, bringing the nation close to the absolute scarcity threshold of 500 m³ per person per year. The agricultural sector, where 80 percent of cultivated land relies on rainfall, has been hit hardest, causing macroeconomic volatility. In 2022, for example, the filling rate of the country’s main dams dropped to 32.8 percent. This has increased socioeconomic inequality, accelerated groundwater depletion, and left many small farmers more vulnerable as they sold their land and became laborers. In response, the Moroccan government has advanced major policy frameworks, including the 2016 law to advance decentralization and community resource management, the Green Morocco Plan, and the 2050 National Water Plan, focusing on dam construction, desalination, water-saving irrigation, and integrated basin-scale water management. At the same time, farmers’ ground water consumption for agriculture seems as unwavering as ever when it is available, with regenerative alternatives remaining seriously on the fringe of applied practices. Terracing vast mountain ranges of the country and planting native fruit and forestry tree varieties upon them and mountaintop plateaus, captures the water and rebuilds aquifers in the most potent way. This priority action for national water sustainability, climate resiliency, and food security will serve not just the mountain communities who experience the most poverty in Morocco, but also the lower lying areas who will have their watersheds resoundingly replenished by this action. During the High Atlas Foundation’s 26 years of rural development work in Morocco, terracing has consistently remained a top priority expressed by mountain farming communities. Terracing mountains increases available agricultural land that benefits every household, a portion of which can be designated to women’s cooperatives and associations. This enables women to enter the agricultural domain as cultivators of their own yield and generators of their employment and recurring source of income. Fortunately in Morocco, there are a number of trees that can grow well in the Atlas’ that are fruit bearing while having forestry tree qualities of hardiness, especially by not having to be irrigated beyond the first several years of growing. These trees include endemic varieties of carob (which is also nitrogen-inducing for soil health), fig, Argan, almond, pistachio, and olive. Local forestry tree species such as oak, juniper, cedar, and acacia are also highly viable. Terrace walls are built primarily with large rocks, and there is an abundance of stones in ravines and eroding mountainsides due to the deforestation that has occurred over generations. The worst of the devastation caused by the 6.8 magnitude High Atlas earthquake in 2023 was the falling rock from mountainsides onto homes, which terracing would have fundamentally addressed. Terracing is a substantial measure that will protect village communities should such a natural catastrophe occur again. The issue of water is certainly reaching national emergency levels, and even as the major infrastructure projects involving desalinization are of course completely vital, the manner of terracing mountains may be the most singular measure to restore watersheds and brace the nation for the increasingly menacing climate crisis whose ratcheting-up effect is being experienced year after year. Other nations have identified their environmental urgencies and have actually enlisted their military to address their crises, and the matter of building mountain terraces and planting endemic trees upon them for the benefit of Morocco’s largest watersheds have reached that incredibly serious level. From Kenya’s Environmental Soldier Program and Ethiopia’s Green Legacy to India’s Ecological Task Force, Eritrea’s terracing, and the Philippines’ one-million-tree drive, armies have been enlisted into restoration. Kenya’s program ties its drive to environmental security, and India raised its task force for ecological restoration. The common thread is that governments facing erosion, deforestation, or climate risk can use a disciplined, logistically capable workforce that could reach degraded terrain and be mobilized quickly for national campaigns. Mountain communities members, like everyone, have to make ends meet every day and cannot afford to give the months and years needed to do this critical work for themselves and the national interest without compensation. Furthermore, mountain areas above water channels are public domain under the jurisdiction of the National Agency for Water and Forests, and this activity fits squarely in their 2030 strategy that champions community partnership. However, the enormity of the task makes it essential that national resources are brought to bear to terrace the Atlas’ of the Kingdom. For the sake of self-reliant water security, food generation, gender empowerment, environmental stabilization, resiliency, restoration, and the basis for national sustainability, mountain terracing is an inescapable and urgent project. It will help make Morocco’s decentralization roadmap a reality by incorporating public-private partnerships and people’s participation in the implementation of initiatives they seek for their lives. |
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