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Land Tenure in Morocco: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Struggles

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Land Tenure Challenges in Africa

Part of the book series: Economic Geography ((ECOGEO))

Abstract

Recent changes (2019) in the legal framework governing collectively owned land in Morocco follow neoliberal economic policies that emphasize market-driven land reform. The new collective land tenure regime also responds to rural unrest and anti-government opposition resulting from state repression, lack of economic opportunity, and land ownership inequality. This chapter assesses these changes as a conjuncture of contemporary contestations over land and the legacy of colonial land governance. A historical overview of land tenure during the colonial era and after independence provides the context for three case studies that illustrate how land tenure policies play out differently depending on the agro-ecological, economic, and political circumstances. We argue that even though international development organizations recognize different ways of organizing rights in land, extractivist forms of capitalism prevalent in Morocco still work to prioritize commoditization, and other measures that dispossess historically marginalized land owners and managers in favor of capital interests.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Platteau 1996 for an overview of the evolutionary theory of land tenure that undergirded this development orthodoxy. International finance institutions have moderated this position and since the early 2000s have officially supported diverse tenure regimes, including collective or customary land holding. However, development projects, lending facilities, and tenure reform initiatives operationalize the new orthodoxy in uneven ways, still foregrounding private property as the most secure—and economically preferable—form of land tenure. Even formalizing collective tenure can have the result of dispossessing the most marginalized groups of communal title holders through dynamics similar to individual titling efforts.

  2. 2.

    See Bouderbala 1999 for an overview of Moroccan land tenure.

  3. 3.

    While the Ministry of Interior oversees the funds collected on behalf of the ethnic collectivities, those collectivities have no access to or control over their accounts and most have never received the money due for contracts on their land since those contracts started being issued in 1919.

  4. 4.

    Sometimes referred to as the Mehdawa in the academic literature.

  5. 5.

    From the word soulala, meaning lineage or ancestral ties.

  6. 6.

    See Berriane 2016 for a discussion of the complexities of the ADFM’s support for the soulaliyate movement.

  7. 7.

    See Cantoni and Rignall (2019), Rignall (2016), and Aoui et al. (2020) for further details on the political and land tenure dynamics of the Noor solar complex.

  8. 8.

    The statistics on state land include some land distributed in agrarian reform processes, because these lands are still owned by the state. Starting in 2006, beneficiaries of agrarian reform were able to get a private title to their land, but only if they are able to pay their back rents—sometimes of 40 years or more—to the state. As a result, most agrarian reform land in the Gharb remains under state ownership.

  9. 9.

    State agencies carried out consolidation processes in the Gharb from the 1970s to 2000s in order to address fragmentation and facilitate plot access to irrigation channels. However, because this was a one-time process, plots continued to undergo inter-generational division in the proceeding decades.

  10. 10.

    There is a large and contentious literature on the relationship between the formalization of property rights and increased access to credit (i.e., Deininger 2010; Williamson 2010; Domeher and Abdulai 2012). In Morocco, the experience of individualizing and privatizing collective farms in the mid-2000s indicates that individual titles can enhance smallholder access to subsidized loans through Crédit Agricole du Maroc, a state-owned agricultural bank.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell University, Ithaca, US

    David Balgley

  2. University of Kentucky, Lexington, US

    Karen Rignall

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  1. David Balgley
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Correspondence to David Balgley .

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  1. Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Horman Chitonge

  2. Director of research and programmes, Good Governance Africa, johannesburg, South Africa

    Ross Harvey

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Balgley, D., Rignall, K. (2021). Land Tenure in Morocco: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Struggles. In: Chitonge, H., Harvey, R. (eds) Land Tenure Challenges in Africa. Economic Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82852-3_9

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