M’HAMID EL GHIZLANE:It may be the gateway to the vast Sahara desert, but that does not mean it’s free of that modern scourge of the environment — the rubbish humanity discards.
In southern Morocco, volunteers are hunting for waste embedded in the sand, and they do not have to look far.
Bottles, plastic bags — “there are all kinds,” noted one helper who has joined the initiative cleaning up the edge of a village bordering the Sahara.
The initiative marks the 20th International Nomads Festival, which is held in mid-April every year in M’Hamid El Ghizlane in Zagora province in southeast Morocco.
Around 50 people, gloved and equipped with rubbish bags, toiled away for five hours — and collected 400 to 600 kilos of waste, the organizers estimated.
“Clean-up initiatives usually focus on beaches and forests,” festival founder Noureddine Bougrab, who lives in the village of around 6,600 people, told AFP.
“But the desert also suffers from pollution.”
The campaign brings together artists, activists and foreign tourists, and is a call for the “world’s deserts to be protected,” said Bougrab, 46.
He said the clean-up began at the northern entrance of the village, “which was badly affected by pollution,” and extended through to the other end of town and the beginning of the “Great Desert.”
The rubbish is “mainly linked to the massive production of plastic products, low recycling rates and atmospheric pollutants carried by the wind,” said anthropologist Mustapha Naimi.
Morocco has a population of almost 37 million and they generate about 8.2 million tons of household waste each year, according to the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development.
“This is equivalent to 811 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — enough to fill 2,780 Olympic swimming pools with compacted waste,” said Hassan Chouaouta, an international expert in sustainable strategic development.
Of this amount, “between six and seven percent” is recycled, he said.


Their morning alarm went off “early,” according to one volunteer, New York-based French photographer Ronan Le Floch, who said the initiative’s aim was “to show that it’s important to take care of this type of environment.”
Another helper was Ousmane Ag Oumar, a 35-year-old Malian member of Imarhan Timbuktu, a Tuareg blues group.
He called the waste a direct danger to livestock, which are essential to the subsistence of nomadic communities.
Naimi, the anthropologist, agreed. “Plastic waste harms the Saharan environment as it contaminates the land, pasture, rivers and nomadic areas,” he said.
Pastoral nomadism is a millennia-old way of life based on seasonal mobility and available pasture for livestock.
But it is on the wane in Morocco, weakened by climate change and with nomadic communities now tending to stay in one place.
The most recent official census of nomads in Morocco dates to 2014, and returned a population of 25,274 — 63 percent lower than a decade earlier in 2004.
Mohammed Mahdi, a professor of rural sociology, said the country’s nomads had “not benefited from much state support, compared to subsidies granted to agriculture, especially for products intended for export.”
“We give very little to nomadic herders, and a good number have gone bankrupt and given up,” he said.
Mohamed Oujaa, 50, is leader of The Sand Pigeons, a group that specializes in the “gnawa” music practiced in the Maghreb by the descendants of black slaves.
For him, a clean environment is vital for future generations, and he hopes the initiative will be “just the first in a series of campaigns to clean up the desert.”

NAJAF: Farmer Hadi Saheb cannot wait to see his wheat fields flourish in the heart of the desert after he tapped into groundwater reserves in water-starved Iraq.
He is just one of many Iraqis who have turned to drilling wells in the desert to help sustain the country’s agriculture.
It is a risky move that threatens to deplete the groundwater in a nation already battered by frequent drought and scarce rainfall.
Although Iraq’s fertile plains traditionally stretch along the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates — the two rivers whose levels have plummeted — Saheb’s vast lands lie in the heart of the southern Najaf desert.
“Year after year the drought worsens, and the desertification intensifies,” said the 46-year-old, dressed in a white abaya as a duststorm swept through the area.
So he has turned to groundwater, taking advantage of a government initiative.
This leases desert land to farmers at a symbolic price of one dollar per dunum (0.25 hectares in Iraq’s measurement), provides subsidised irrigation systems, and buys their harvest at a preferential rate.
Now that he doesn’t have to rely solely on rainfall, Saheb said he cultivates 20 times more land than before, and his harvest has increased to 250 tons.
“It would be impossible to continue without groundwater, which we cannot extract without drilling wells,” he said.
Like many other farmers, Saheb has upgraded his irrigation techniques.


He now relies on a center-pivot method involving equipment rotating in a circle to water crops through sprinklers.
This uses at least 50 percent less water than flooding — the vastly more wasteful traditional way used for millennia, during which the land is submerged.
According to the agriculture ministry, Iraq cultivated 3.1 million dunums (775,000 hectares) this winter using groundwater and modern irrigation systems, while the rivers watered only two million dunums.
In Najaf, desert farming has expanded significantly.
According to Moneim Shahid from Najaf’s agriculture authorities, crop yields have been boosted by new irrigation methods, tougher seeds and fertilizers suitable for arid soils.
Shahid said he expects a harvest in Najaf this year of at least 1.7 tons of wheat per dunum in the desert, compared with 1.3 tons in areas irrigated by rivers.
Last year Iraq had a very good harvest, exceeding self-sufficiency with a production of 6.4 million tons of wheat, according to agriculture ministry figures.
Religious institutions such as the Imam Hussein Shrine in the holy city of Karbala back the authorities and also support desert farming.
Qahtan Awaz from the shrine’s agriculture department said the institution, which employs families to farm desert areas, is cultivating 1,000 hectares and aims to more than triple that amount.
Today, groundwater reservoirs help mitigate agricultural losses caused by drought, an already frequent phenomenon in Iraq that is worsened by a warming planet.
But preserving those resources is proving to be a challenge.
Shahid from Najaf’s agriculture authorities, said “we should be vigilant” in protecting groundwater, calling it “a strategic reserve for future generations.”
Its use “should be rationed ... and sprinklers could help regulate consumption,” he said.


The Najaf desert lies above the Umm el-Radhuma and the Dammam aquifers, which Iraq shares with neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Water levels in both aquifers have declined, according to the United Nations which has also voiced caution that aquifers worldwide are depleting faster than they can be replenished naturally.
A 2023 UN report warned that Saudi Arabia used much of its groundwater to grow wheat in the desert, depleting more than 80 percent of its resources and forcing authorities to stop cultivating wheat after 2016.
Sameh Al-Muqdadi, a water politics and climate security expert, warned that Iraq’s groundwater levels have already dropped.
Water used to be found 50 or 100 meters deep (165-330 feet), but today wells are dug 300 meters deep, he said.
“People believe that these resources will stay forever... which is not true,” Muqdadi warned.
Authorities have no estimates for Iraq’s groundwater, and the most recent figures date back to the 1970s, he said.
“If you don’t have any estimation, you cannot manage your resources.”
“Groundwater is a contingency measure, and it should be used only in urgent cases” such as droughts “to sustain food security only,” not to expand farmland for commercial purposes, Muqdadi said.
But unfortunately, “this is what we have nowadays.”