This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be ‘new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.

In this article, I explore a case of agrarian transformation in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the role of customary land tenure and discourses of tradition in current movements for food sovereignty and land rights. A half-century of labor migration from Morocco to Europe enabled formerly subjugated groups to challenge indentured sharecropping as a regime of racialized domination in Morocco's pre-Saharan oases. By methodically refashioning the same customary institutions that had enforced their historical subjugation, the strategies of former sharecroppers shed light on the role of custom in movements for land and food sovereignty. Rather than using custom to return to traditional modes of farming, peasant farmers in the oasis valley invoked customary land tenure to challenge repressive traditions and forge a nascent commercial agricultural sector. I argue that one way custom works is through its performative and transactional qualities. Instead of challenging the relationship between political authority and land, former sharecroppers reworked status relationships by investing customary land tenure institutions with new meanings. They produced forms of communality that managed exclusions productively, eschewing rights talk for the language of custom and tradition. I extend recent scholarship on movements around land and agrofood systems, exploring how a politics rooted in the practice of agriculture can challenge repressive institutions not by dismantling the architecture of exclusion so much as Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 4,

De nombreux mouvements pour la souveraineté alimentaire et de nombreux programmes de développement ont mis en avant le rôle des agriculteurs familiaux dans la mise en oeuvre de pratiques agricoles durables. Cependant, une telle approche fait face en pratique à de nombreux défis dans les oasis du Sud-Est du Maroc. La plupart des chercheurs et des décideurs s'accordent sur le fait que ces oasis sont soumises à des pressions environnementales et économiques sans précédent. Dans ce contexte, le potentiel de l'agriculture oasienne reste limité. Cet article examine l'histoire récente de l'agriculture familiale dans la vallée de M'Goun (province de Tinghir) pour proposer une perspective alternative sur ce type d'agriculture. Cet article se fonde sur une étude de cas pour étudier les changements profonds de l'agriculture d'oasis durant plus d'un demi-siècle. La façon dont les agriculteurs ont intégré des nouveaux impératifs économiques et techniques dans ...

This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be 'new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.

In 2009, the Kingdom of Morocco embarked on the Solar Plan, an ambitious 10-year plan to become a leading solar power producer. This paper examines the genesis of the first project in the plan, a concentrated solar power plant near the pre-Saharan city of Ouarzazate, in order to explore the “energy transition” as a political as well as geographic project. I specifically address how the government's acquisition of land drew on colonial strategies for dispossession that were subsequently embraced by the post-colonial state. At the same time, bureaucratic processes for responding to community demands effectively narrowed popular opposition to a set of technocratic problems to be solved by development interventions. The official discourse of global environmental remediation obscured the socio-ecological relations at work in the project, constructing the land as marginal so as to facilitate investment and foreclosing resident's broader political claims. Attending to the political...

This paper explores rural poverty through a relational lens, arguing that new spatial patterns of poverty stemming from global economic transformations call for a relational approach; one that draws attention to the importance of global integration while recognizing that places are absorbed differently and unevenly into circuits of capital accumulation. The spread of neoliberalism has reconfigured rural spaces, and the production of poverty knowledge reinforces this uneven spatiality. We address recent literature extending the critical analysis of poverty and welfare in the Global North to the production of poverty knowledge and development practice globally. We examine the various technologies of power that ask the subjects of rural poverty to be empowered, moral, and market-oriented subjects. This attention to how rural poverty is governed and how rural subjects are inserted into the project of development highlights the distinct role of rural spaces in relation to poverty studies. We emphasize the spatially and temporally disjointed ways in which rural spaces and subjectivities are reconfigured, calling for greater attention to ethnographic accounts of the lived experiences of poverty. We argue for a reconsideration the "global rural" in processes of uneven development. 1 | INTRODUCTION Recent critical scholarship has reframed the problematics of poverty and development from how global capitalism excludes the poor to how poverty is intrinsically produced through capitalism's ordinary operations. Critics of the development enterprise argue that within mainstream poverty and development discourse, "durable poverty is exceptionalized rather than understood relationally as also caused or deepened by ordinary processes of capitalism" (Mosse, 2010: 239). Exploring the relational dimensions of poverty reveals the tensions inherent in contemporary capitalist processes. On the one hand, it has become increasingly difficult to draw the boundaries between urban and rural. Migration flows to and from urban areas intertwine the urban and rural in complicated ways (De Haas, 2006; Glick-Schiller & Faist, 2010; Iskander 2010). It is not only the movement of people or their remittances that causes this blurring. In recent years, investment flows to rural zones in the Global North and South alike underscore how capital moves in new ways across rural spaces, drawing them into global circuits of capital accumulation and labor

Over the last decade, Moroccan administrations have developed a daring energy strategy, anchored by a large increase in renewables and supported by international finance institutions. In this paper, we use a multiscalar and multidisciplinary approach to examine a core element of this energy strategy-the Moroccan Solar Plan. When analyzed for its connections to the Euro-African Desertec Project, the Solar Plan illustrates the transnational governance implications of regional energy projects, simultaneously supporting European renewable energy goals and Moroccan geopolitical aims. However, we argue that an exclusive focus on energy transition at larger geographic scales can obscure the local governance implications of large-scale renewable projects. We explore such implications by reviewing how local populations were integrated into the project's design and implementation. Thus, we employ a hybrid STS/critical geography approach to explore the parallel processes of land acquisition and technological decision-making for a solar power plant in southeastern Morocco; and to illustrate how Morocco's regional aspirations were intertwined with the territorialization goals associated with the government's political centralism. We argue that the ways in which the Moroccan government constructed the land's marginality and made technological decisions for the plant illustrate how renewable energy discourses can extend existing relations of power into new domains of governance.

We integrate qualitative and quantitative methods to document the long-term impact of international migration remittances on household investment strategies, wealth outcomes, and equity of asset ownership among households in a Moroccan oasis valley. In the early 1960s, nearly 80,000 Moroccan men from the southeastern oases left their families to work in French coal mines. Anthropological fieldwork shows that this migration event initiated decades-long streams of steady income in the forms of remittances and pension checks. Accompanying household-level empirical analysis shows that this afforded the migrant-sending households a foothold in the 'new' economy: Households invested in vocational training, secondary schooling, and business ownership at rates higher than their nonsending counterparts. Migration also hastened the transition of households out of the 'old economy'-land and livestock ownership declined for migrant-sending households, particularly those owning more land. We also document that the migration event was unusually open-work in the coal mines was open to virtually anyone-meaning that the recruits came from across the entire class-and economic spectrum. The combination of an unusually low entry cost and the resultant provision of a large and long flow of cash meant that overall, migration was an equalizing force in the economy.

I transliterate place-names as they appear in official rec ords in Morocco or are other wise commonly written. I adopt the transliterations people use for their own names or, when I could not ascertain individual preferences, use the dominant spellings, which usually follow French conventions (ou for a long u, for example). For other words in Tashelhit, the local Amazigh language, and Arabic, I use a simplified version of the International Journal of Middle East Studies transliteration system (namely, using diacritical marks only for the letters ʿayn and hamza and removing indications of long vowels and the doubled letter for the shadda). All translations are mine.

We estimate the present-day effects on rural Moroccan households of past international migration--specifically, recruitment to work in the French mines sixty years--and its associated remittances and pensions. Using cluster analysis twice—once to categorize households as poor and non-poor in the early 1960s and again to categorize the directly-descended household in 2014—we identify the households that moved upward economically over the intervening period. Seemingly-unrelated probit estimation is then used to gauge the degree to which migration facilitated this process. We find that migration significantly increased the likelihood that the sending family's current-day members would presently be non-poor. Surprisingly, we also find that the simple act of applying to migrate also has a similar effect. For the poorest (in the pre-migration period) of households, recruitment for work could well have been exogenous. For these households, migration to work in the French mines is, by f...

Following best financial management practices that increase the likelihood of long-term economic sustainability is likely not the primary concern of nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits focus their attention primarily on achieving mission-driven goals. However, research reports that balancing financial sustainability with an organizational mission is a core challenge for most nonprofits, particularly for organizations serving low-income households. This article provides a case study of Farmer Foodshare Inc., a US nonprofit social enterprise in the food sector working with financially challenged family farms, food-insecure households, and low-income elementary school students. This case study was prepared with primary data collected during interviews and secondary sources. In the summer of 2019, the management team of Farmer Foodshare needed to revisit the organization’s operating model. Management in this organization was concerned about whether strategic decisions, such as discontin...

Short-term missions participants encounter difference in purportedly captivating ways. Current research, however, indicates the practice does not lead to long-lasting, positive change. Brian M. Howell (2012) argues the short-term missions experience is confined to the limitations of the short-term missions narrative. People who engage in short-term missions build assumptions, seek experiences, understand difference, and convey meaning, as a result of this narrative. The process of telling and retelling travel stories is integral to the short-term missions experience. Drawing upon literature on tourism, narrative, development, and photography, this study intends to evaluate the inefficacy of short-term missions through the stories which produce and are produced by photography. Through storytelling and photography from 21 short-term missions participants who have served in Ouanaminthe, Haiti, this project deconstructs the short- term missions narrative to understand, what is the relationship between the use of photography and the short-term missions experience? The results indicate a unique relationship between people, photography, and experiences within the framework of short-term missions.