Acceso usuarios
Mahmoud Maamar, Zhour Bouzidi, Marcel Kuper, Pierre-Louis Mayaux
The agricultural boom outside North Africa’s oases has receded in some cases due to increased land and water scarcity. Facing frontier closure, children of the settler generation negotiate their place on the family farm or as independent providers of agricultural services. We explore these negotiations and their outcomes, focusing on the strategies of 24 young individuals navigating unequal intergenerational and gendered configurations in the Ferkla oasis (Morocco). Three types of relations exist on family farms: emancipation; co-management; or submission to the elder’s authority. Four explanatory factors of these relations are foregrounded: the taker’s educational and financial resources; his capacity to seize opportunities offered by public policies; and the elder’s perception of farm viability. Asymmetric negotiations also play out around services provision, increasingly seen by young women as a pathway to autonomy. The paper highlights that young people’s involvement in agriculture is a variegated process, crucially shaped by broader patterns of land and water availability, the broader network of social relationships and the policy landscape.
