KENITRA, Morocco (AP) — Golden wheat fields in Morocco no longer yield the bounty they once did. six-year drought has endangered the country’s entire agricultural sector, including farmers who grow grains used to feed people and livestock.
The North African country expects this year’s harvest to be smaller than last year, both in volume and area, leaving farmers without jobs and requiring more imports and government subsidies to prevent prices of basic products such as flour from rising for ordinary consumers.
“We used to have an abundance — a lot of wheat. But for the last seven or eight years, the harvest has been very low because of the drought,” said Al Housni Belhoussni, a small-scale farmer who has long farmed fields outside the city of Kenitra.
Belhoussni’s plight is familiar to grain farmers around the world who are facing a hotter and drier future. Climate change is endanger the food supply and reducing annual yields of grains that dominate the global diet – wheat, rice, maize and barley.
In North Africa, one of the regions considered most vulnerable to climate change, delays in annual rainfall and erratic weather patterns are pushing the growing season later in the year, making it difficult for farmers to plan.
In Morocco, where grains make up the majority of the agricultural land and agriculture employs the majority of workers in rural areas, the drought is wreaking havoc and causing major changes that will alter the composition of the economy. It has forced some to leave their fields fallow. It has also made the areas they do choose to farm less productive, leaving them producing far fewer bags of wheat to sell than they once did.
In response, the government has announced restrictions on water use in urban areas, including public baths and car washes – and in the countryside, where water for farms is rationed.
“The late rains in the fall affected the agricultural campaign. This year, only the spring rains, especially in March, were able to save the crops,” said Abdelkrim Naaman, president of Nalsya. The organization has been advising farmers on sowing, irrigation and mitigating droughts, as less rain falls and less water flows through Morocco’s rivers.
The Agriculture Department estimates that this year’s wheat crop will yield about 3.4 million tons (3.1 billion kilograms), far less than last year’s 6.1 million tons (5.5 billion kilograms) — a yield that was still considered low. The amount of sown land has also shrunk dramatically, from 14,170 square miles (36,700 square kilometers) to 9,540 square miles (24,700 square kilometers).
Such a decline is a crisis, said Driss Aissaoui, an analyst and former member of the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture.
“When we say crisis, it means you have to import more,” he said. “We are in a country where drought has become a structural problem.”
By relying more on imports, the government will have to continue to subsidize prices to ensure households and livestock farmers can afford basic foods for their families and herds, said Rachid Benali, chairman of the agricultural lobby COMADER.
The country imported nearly 2.5 million tons of wheat between January and June. Such a solution may have a shelf life, however, especially since Morocco’s main source of wheat, France, is also facing shrinking harvests.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations this year ranked Morocco as the world’s sixth-largest wheat importer, after Turkey and Bangladesh, both of which have much larger populations.
“Morocco has had droughts like this and in some cases droughts that lasted more than 10 years. But the problem, especially this time, is climate change,” Benali said.
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Hassan Alaoui reported from Rabat and Kenitra, Morocco.