New spaces for water justice? Groundwater extraction and changing gendered subjectivities in Morocco’s Saïss region

Introduction For the last couple of decades, groundwater tables in the Saïss agricultural plain, mid-north Morocco, have been dropping. This is partly due to intensified groundwater use in agriculture and changing cropping patterns. Specifically, since the 1980s, farmers have increasingly dug wells to engage in commercial agriculture. From growing rain-fed crops, they have shifted to higher-value irrigated crops, notably onions and other vegetables. Changing tenure relations (land privatization, most notably) and new agricultural policies that actively promoted modernization have further intensified groundwater use. Today, water-intensive crops produced in the region are sold on regional, national and international markets. They produce new material and cultural linkages between hitherto-unconnected life worlds, interactively reshaping socio-natural relations. They open up new possibilities of living and being, but also close off old ones. In this chapter, we describe and analyze these changes to interrogate them from a feminist-justice perspective. We use material from extensive ethnographic fieldwork, conducted over a two-year period from 2011 to 2013, complemented by various recurring several-week visits over 2014 and 2015. We have focused on anecdotes regarding the changing groundwater and irrigation dynamics that illustrate how they are intimately linked to changing gender relations. Rather than merely assessing or mapping the gendered impacts of intensifying groundwater use, our purpose is to tease out how prevailing gendered ways of being, working, and relating co-shape and in turn are shaped by new agricultural and groundwater dynamics, in ways that are not always straightforward or easy to predict. Hence, our argument is that groundwater abstraction and gender relations dynamics co-constitute each other, which also means that one cannot be comprehended without the other. We show this by focusing on how intensifying groundwater use, and the larger changes it provokes, is made possible through and shaped by changing the gendered organization of labor and space. Contemporary agrarian policies in Morocco intended to promote a new kind of green revolution are significantly premised on promoting a particular gendered organization of farming (and consequently of families), souting specific roles, responsibilities and rightsto men and to women. Hence, the two main protagonists of agricultural modernization that the Moroccan government focuses on and wants to support are new agricultural investors, and those existing farmers who have the spirit and willingness to modernize. In public policies, these protagonists are clearly cast as men - with farms figuring as enterprises that operate with a logic of profit maximization.