Moroccans suffer as droughts get worse

RABAT: Mohamed gave up farming because of successive droughts that have hit his previously fertile but isolated village in Morocco and because he just couldn’t bear it any longer.

“To see villagers rush to public fountains in the morning or to a neighbour to get water makes you want to cry,” the man in his 60s said.

“The water shortage is making us suffer,” he said in Ouled Essi Masseoud village, around 140km from the country’s economic capital Casablanca.

But it is not just his village that is suffering -- all of the North African country has been hit.

No longer having access to potable running water, the villagers of Ouled Essi Masseoud rely solely on sporadic supplies in public fountains and from private wells.

“The fountains work just one or two days a week, the wells are starting to dry up and the river next to it is drying up more and more,” said Mohamed Sbai as he went to fetch water from neighbours.

The situation is critical, given the village’s position in the agricultural province of Setat, near the Oum Errabia River and the Al Massira Dam, Morocco’s second largest.

Its reservoir supplies drinking water to several cities, including the three million people who live in Casablanca.

But latest official figures show it is now filling at a rate of just five per cent.

Al Massira reservoir has been reduced to litle more than a pond bordered by kilometres of cracked earth.

Nationally, dams are filling at a rate of only 27 per cent, precipitated by the country’s worst drought in at least four decades.

At 600 cubic metres of water annually per capita, Morocco is already well below the water scarcity threshold of 1,700 cubic metres per capita per year, according to the World Health Organization.

In the 1960s, water availability was four times higher -- at 2,600 cubic metres.

A July World Bank report on the Moroccan economy said the decrease in the availability of renewable water resources put the country in a situation of “structural water stress.”

The authorities have now introduced water rationing.

The interior ministry ordered local authorities to restrict supplies when necessary, and prohibits using drinking water to irrigate green spaces and golf courses.

Illegal withdrawals from wells, springs or waterways have also been prohibited.

In the longer term, the government plans to build 20 seawater desalination plants by 2030, which should cover a large part of the country’s needs.