Agrarian Modernization and Change in Morocco: The Case of the Plan Vert

Abstract

In the context of the 2008 global food crisis, the Moroccan government launched the Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), the country’s rural strategy for the next decade ambitioning to make agriculture a key sector for economic growth (MoA 2008). The Plan Vert embraces policies of comparative advantages which have sustained in the African continent “colonially inherited patterns of export resource dependency, and to purchase food on international markets” (Bush and Martiniello 2017, 195). Contract farming schemes are at the centre of this process. Following the growing criticism of land grabs, contract farming schemes have been embraced by developmental agencies and their governmental partners as an alternative promoting a process of inclusive development (Martiniello 2020, 3). The PMV’s iteration of the ‘win-win’ claim (ADA 2016; MoA 2008) reflects and foments a depoliticized view of land and food imposing and concealing a new discipline on land, labour and nature through contract farming (Martiniello 2020, 3). This thesis presents itself as preliminary research for a firmer study of the trajectories of agrarian restructuring and change promoted through contract farming schemes under Morocco’s decennial agricultural strategy. Theoretically grounded in agrarian political economy, political ecology and political sociology, I interrogate the ways in which generations of knowledge and practices on contract farming came about in Morocco. How is the Plan Vert imposing a new discipline on land, labour and nature? How depoliticization (system of belief, power and politics) was reinforced through a professionalization of the rural (expertise), financialization and internationalization of agriculture changing land-based power relations and creating new subjectivities? And how are these dynamics (re)shaping the agrarian question in the MENA region in general and in Morocco in particular?