Cannabis and Hashish Production in Morocco: Context and Issues

Territorial control and the scope and resilience of cannabis and other illegal drug crop cultivation

“…20 The aforementioned deficits in politico-territorial control obviously raise the question of the limits that exist between legality and illegality, between toleration and corruption, and between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The three politico-territorial conditions presented above in the second scenario as distinct types or subtypes (inherent state limitations, state toleration, and state powerlessness) are drawn from case studies presented in previous work and that cannot be reproduced here for lack of space (Chouvy, 2008;2009;2014a;2014b;2016;Chouvy and Afsahi, 2014) 2 . Their diversity shows in particular that large-scale illegal drug crop cultivation can be undertaken regardless of political regimes (democratic, dictatorial, monarchical) or of legislative or coercive apparatus (not even the most powerful).…”

“…Whether in Afghanistan or in Burma, the political fragmentation of both state and nonstate actors involved in the armed conflicts further drove the recourse to thriving drug economies that ended up motivating at least some of the belligerents (Chouvy, 2002). 6 While there are cases, such as in Morocco, where illegal drug crop cultivation (cannabis) is a historical heritage of distant wars (the 1920s Rif War), there are of course also cases where large-scale commercial illegal drug crops have developed outside of war or armed conflicts, as evidenced by the United States (indoor but also vast outdoor cannabis cultivation) and India (both outdoor cannabis and opium poppy cultivation) (Chouvy, 2008;2014;2015). The case of the United States is most interesting for it actually invalidates two of the most often cited causal explanations of illegal drug crop cultivation: war and underdevelopment (along with so-called failed states, overt corruption, etc.).…”

Cultivo de cannabis y degradación del espacio forestal en la provincia de Taounate (Rif Meridional, Marruecos): repercusiones paisajísticas y económicas

“…De hecho, estudios realizados por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, Oficina contra la Droga y el Crimen (ONUDC, 2003(ONUDC, , 2005(ONUDC, , 2006(ONUDC, y 2007 en colaboración con el gobierno marroquí calcularon que, aproximadamente, en Marruecos se contabilizaban 134.000 hectáreas dedicadas a este tipo de cultivo en el año 2004, lo que le convierte en el mayor productor mundial (Chouvy, 2008), estando la mayor parte de ellas en el Rif (aproximadamente, el 90 % total de la producción del país).…”

A brief agricultural history of cannabis in Africa, from prehistory to canna-colony

“…Cannabis is widely a cash crop for poor farmers where legal agriculture has become economically or ecologically untenable (Carrier and Klantschnig, 2016;Laniel, 2006;Perez and Laniel, 2004). In some countries, cannabis is a major national commodity with well-organized, if illegal, institutions of production, distribution, and marketing (Suckling, 2016;Laudati, 2014;Chouvy, 2008). 3 Questions about cannabis liberalization in Africa are inevitably agricultural even if farming is overlooked in national drug policies (see Kalunta-Crumpton, 2015).…”