ABSTRACT
While vaccination campaigns against COVID-19 were launched worldwide, a drama has been unfolding in the Moroccan countryside. It has been marked, over the last couple of decades, by rapid agrarian transformation, manifestations of which have included expanding irrigation frontiers and the increasing growth of high-value crops. These dynamics rely strongly on female agricultural wageworkers. Although they earn low wages, their income is crucial and is used to care for loved ones by paying for school fees, rent, electricity, and medicines. These workers, therefore, cannot afford to quit their jobs. However, most female wageworkers in Morocco are employed without a contract or social security cover. While working in an informal environment and living already in a precarious situation, little is known about how the pandemic has affected them. In this article, the researchers seek to supply some of this information by drawing on the authors' commitment over almost a decade of covering female wage-workers' experiences in different agricultural regions in Morocco. Additionally, since March 2020, the researchers have conducted 30 phone interviews with female laborers and farmers in the Saiss and in the coastal area of the Gharb and Loukkos. Using the pandemic as a focus, our results illustrate the inherent contradictions upon which Morocco's agricultural boom has been founded. Although many female laborers are de facto heads of household or contribute in fundamental ways to the household income, they continue to be considered as secondary earners or as housewives, leading to low structural wages. Moreover, these women assume the prime responsibility for all domestic tasks, which are not economically recognized or valued. Consequently, they face new challenges in addition to their already precarious situations. Reduced work opportunities and limited state support have led to financial and psychological hardship which jeopardize their own and their family's survival.
ABSTRACT
From mid-March 2020 onwards, the Algerian and Moroccan governments instituted a lockdown to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in the closure of local markets and mobility restrictions. Even though these measures were implemented halfway through the agricultural year, the media and scientific coverage of the impact of the pandemic focused mainly on urban areas, leaving aside the experiences of rural people. This article aims to partially fill this gap by analysing how smallholder farmers, women and men, young producers, and workers in two oasis regions in the Maghreb, experienced these new challenges. To do so, the researchers rely on 150 phone interviews conducted with rural actors in the Dr..a Valley (Morocco) and the M'zab Valley (Algeria). By putting their experiences at the heart of our analysis, the researchers show how the health crisis has put constraints on the ability of the majority of smallholder farmers to sell their products and how it has put a strain on the various activities of oasis families, making them more vulnerable. Then, the researchers illustrate how these actors developed different individual and collective resilience practices, through the establishment of a virtual labor market to replace the traditional moquefs (places of recruitment of workers), the adoption of agroecological practices, and the reinvention of solidarity and collective action.