Abdelkhalek Benabdallah strode among towering marijuana plants and checked the buds for the tell-tale spots of white that indicate they are ready for harvest.
By September, much of the crop had been picked and left to dry on the roofs of the stone-and-wood huts that dot the Rif Valley, the heart Morocco’s pot-growing region. Benabdallah openly grows the crop, despite the risk.
“We are regularly subject to blackmail by the gendarmes,” he said as he scythed through stalks.
Morocco’s marijuana farmers live in a strange limbo in which the brilliant green fields are largely left alone, but growers face constant police harassment. A new draft law may bring some reprieve: It aims to legalize marijuana grown for medical and industrial uses, in a radical step for a Muslim nation that could alleviate poverty and social unrest.
However, it faces stiff opposition in the conservative country, as well as the suspicions of farmers themselves, who think politicians can do nothing to help them.
Morocco is joining other countries and US states in re-examining drug policies, but its Islamic faith creates a strong taboo on drugs, despite the north’s centuries-old tradition of growing the plant.
Morocco is a top supplier of hashish. The World Customs Authority said that last year, 65 percent of hashish seized at customs worldwide came from Morocco, with most going to Europe.
Estimates vary wildly for how much the business is worth, but legalization would certainly provide a substantial boost to Morocco’s farmers and anemic economy, which will grow just 2.5 percent this year.
Yet farmers remain suspicious of measures by politicians, who they say have never done anything for their poor, neglected region. They fear that legalization might depress the already low price of US$8 per kilogram of weed that they receive.
“If legalization happened for all of Morocco, we could never compete with the other farmers that have lots of land and the price of cannabis wouldn’t be any different than that of carrots,” said Mohammed Benabdallah, an activist in the village of Oued Abdel Ghaya.
While customers pay top dollar for hash and weed in Amsterdam, the Moroccan farmers who produce it make on average just US$3,000 to US$4,000 a year. Farmers also complain about having to dodge police and avoiding the major towns for fear of arrest — unless they are ready to pay bribes.
Yet there are few alternatives. The valley’s rocky soil is poor and the only crop that seems to thrive there is pot. It was legal to grow under royal mandate in certain parts of the Rif until 1974, when Rabat passed a blanket ban on the cultivation and consumption of all drugs.
The security-centered approach to the problem has failed, said Mehdi Bensaid, a lawmaker with the opposition Party of Authenticity and Modernity that has presented parliament with the legalization law.
“If Morocco has a crop that could produce these medicines that could be sold today in the US, Canada and France, it is an employment opportunity for citizens living in a miserable situation,” Bensaid said.
Rabat has tried and failed to persuade farmers to substitute other crops. By 2010, most alternative crop programs had been suspended.
Mohammed Fathi, 83, said he was part of a cooperative that grew olives, figs and almonds until it failed due to lack of rain.
“Marijuana resists the drought that kills other plants,” he said.
It remains to be seen if the law will be on the agenda of the new session of parliament on Friday.
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