Morocco's (Illegal) Mussel Pickers and the Marine Ecosystem

This article from Radio Netherlands clarified a lot of what I would see in Rabat along the Ocean - men in the water at all times of  day and night with buckets and flashlights. Mussels  are apparently worth such effort , especially if you are unemployed.
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Morocco's illegal mussel pickers ply non-eco trade

Published on 29 August 2012 - 7:33pm

Thousands of Morocco's unemployed slum-dwellers head to the Atlantic coast every morning to scrape a living as illegal mussel pickers. But experts say they threaten the health of the marine ecosystem.

The stretch of coast between Rabat and Casablanca, Morocco's economic capital renowned for its sprawling slums, or "bidonvilles," is the most popular destination for these unlicensed fishermen, who flock to the area at low tide.

The mussels that line the rocky sections of the coast are highly sought after in Morocco, where they are served up in tajines, or cooked with onions and lemons, and are particularly in demand during the holy month of Ramadan.

So when the tide is out, the poachers scour the rocks with iron bars they use to catch the black-shelled mollusks, and with the full knowledge of the authorities, who are supposed to help protect the shoreline but instead turn a blind eye.

Unemployment is a major problem in Morocco -- tens of thousands demonstrated in Casablanca in May demanding jobs -- so the unauthorised mussel-pickers are tolerated, as an official in Harhoura, a seaside resort near Rabat, explained.

"We can't stop this informal activity because we have nothing to offer the fishermen as an alternative," he told AFP.
More importantly, from an ecological point of view, the government has never passed a law to encourage the conservation of the mussels, which play an important role in preserving the marine environment.

They act as filters for microbes found along the coast, including bacteria and algae, excreting nutrients that stimulate the growth of plant plankton, which in turn benefit the fish.

Their shells are also able to absorb metal pollutants, adding to concerns among environmentalists about their disappearance.
The sides of the rocks south of Rabat are scoured by the mussel pickers on a daily basis "and left bare," according to a Moroccan development NGO.

The poachers have much to gain from this activity. One person may collect 200 kilos of mussels per day, which when shelled would yield about 3-4 kilos of meat, sold to buyers for around 50 dirhams (4.5 euros) per kilo and potentially earning the poachers between 100 and 150 dirhams per day.

There are no official figures on the number of poachers plying the trade along the heavily urbanised shoreline south of the capital, but an official in the Rabat prefecture estimated there are more than 2,000 during peak season.

At other times, the number drops by half.
During the summer months, they work in small groups down on the coast, and are also seen seated at the roadside, selling their mussels in the sweltering heat, which brings problems of its own.

"Exposing mussels to the sun for too long can make them a health hazard to the consumer," said Abdelaziz Ben Ameur, a doctor in Rabat.

But for all the risks involved, Moroccans are still happy to fork out for a bag of fresh mussels, and the poaching business helps many of the area's unemployed to support their families.
Brahim Touil, a seasoned poacher at Temara, south of Rabat, strongly defends his line of work, which he says enables him to feed seven people.

"If they tried to stop me from collecting mussels, I would beat myself to death," he told AFP.
For the moment it appears unlikely that anyone will try and stop him, but the National Institute for Fish Resources insists the exploitation of coastal resources is subject to regulations that must be adhered to.

"The rules for gathering mussels must be respected," institute director Mustapha Faik told AFP, adding that unfortunately "that is not the case."

Faik admitted that getting a permit to collect mussels can involve lengthy bureaucratic procedures at the ministry of fisheries.

"But the ministry provides information on this. If they want authorisation, of course they can get it."

Rachid Choukri, who heads marine studies at the environment ministry, laments that research on the environmental impact of mussel collecting in Morocco did not take into account the large informal sector.

"No authority is managing this, and it is time that the government opened this file, for the benefit of our fish resources," he said.
© ANP/AFP

Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen - a New Book by Moroccan Writer Mahi Binebine

Here is an article about a new book by Mahi Binebine that is once again treating the familiar subject of Moroccan slums and the creation of terrorists. It is a topic that peaks Western interest, but the books/movies on this subject don't seem to ignite any strong anti-poverty movement in the 'Ghrib.
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BOOKS: STORY OF A KAMIKAZE IN THE CASABLANCA ATTACKS

(ANSAmed) - PARIS - ''Les etoiles de Sidi Moumen'', the latest book by Moroccan writer, painter and sculptor Mahi Binebine, tells the story of the journey of one of the young kamikazes who took part in the Casablanca suicide attacks on May 16 2003, and the social, religious and human malaise of the Moroccan shantytowns.

Released in January by Flammarion, in addition to receiving positive reviews - it was recommended by 2008 Nobel prize-winner for literature J.M.G. Le Clezio - it will be turned into a film, directed by Moroccan, Nabil Ayouch. The adaptation of the book is one of the 15 projects chosen for their artistic quality by the Cannes Film Festival's Cinefondation. The projects will be presented at the next edition of the event in May to seek financing. The full-length film will cost three million euros and should be filmed in November in Casablanca and Fes.

At the beginning of the book, one would expect a Moroccan version of 'City of joy', but the shantytown-dwelling youngsters of Sidi Mounem get involved with an emir who offers Yachine and his gang of shoeless rascals who dream of becoming the best footballers of all time, ''the keys to paradise'', which will open the door to hell for them. Binebine imagines what goes through the head of a youngster from a family of 13 brothers, who grew up in the dumps of one of the worst slums only 15 minutes from the economic capital of the country, clogged with over 100,000 people. ''In Sidi Mounem, I discovered a Morocco that I did not know, which shocked me, a sort of Calcutta,'' said the writer, who took five years ''of pain and difficult writing to put an urban nightmare into black and white''. A childhood made up of robberies, bloody dealings, hashish, but also love for one's mother, laughter, football, and then the descent into the underworld towards a misguided Islam synonymous of terror.

A novel, not a political book, which speaks to the powers that be with a simple message, explained the author: take care of these youngsters, educate them, give them jobs, give them back their dignity. We are sitting on a powder keg, tomorrow there could be another tragedy.

Building Affordable Housing in Morocco

Here is an article from the Financial Times about plans to increase affordable housing in al-Maghreb.
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Morocco offers home help to its poor

By Heba Saleh

Published: April 7 2010 17:42 | Last updated: April 7 2010 17:42



Standing outside her ramshackle home in one of Casablanca’s slums, Aziza El Shannani bemoans her living conditions.

“If it rains, the water comes in, and if there is wind, the roof moves,” she says.

Some 2,500 people live in the huddle of small dwellings made from breeze blocks and topped with metal sheets weighed down with stones. The narrow alleys between the houses are less than a metre across. There is no running water in the homes, with residents instead having to use a public tap.

Many such as Ms Shannani say they would like to leave but they have to wait for a government scheme to progress. Morocco has a shortfall of 1.2m low-cost homes, and every year this figure increases by 125,000.

It is a region-wide problem that the Moroccan government hopes to tackle with a package of incentives designed to revive the construction of low-cost housing, which was announced in its most recent budget.

This includes tax breaks for buyers and developers alike, with 10-year exemptions from capital gains tax for companies building affordable housing.

One company taking advantage of the new measures is Addoha, one of the North African nation’s largest real estate developers, which accounts for almost half of the low-cost housing being constructed in Morocco.

The company plans to build up to 25,000 apartments for people on low-incomes in the country this year, and 120,000 homes over five years.

“The tax exemptions are for 10 years so it gives us clear visibility,” says Abderazzak Oualieallah, assistant director-general of Addoha. “Our profit margin is 30 per cent but it was difficult when the tax breaks were abolished in 2008.”

The company has a land bank of 6,000 hectares, half of which is earmarked for affordable homes. Land for housing aimed at the poor is provided by the state at a discounted price.

Mr Oualieallah says he expects the easier terms for developers to encourage more companies to enter the sector and that the problem of unmet demand could end within 10 years.

Despite the fact that the company has yet to announce the locations of the developments, more than 150,000 people have put their names down on a waiting list.

“Renting is not good because landlords are always trying to throw you out,” says Khadija Greir, as she leaves the the Addoha headquarters in Casablanca after registering for an apartment for herself and her unemployed 34-year-old son.

Ms Greir says that King Mohammed, Morocco’s ruler, “is now doing us this good deed by giving each buyer a gift” of Dh40,000 ($4,750).

The “gift” is a rebate on value added tax to which low-income buyers are entitled, as part of the housing package announced in the budget. Registration fees have also been abolished.

The number of units a developer has to build to qualify for the incentives is 500 over two years. The units should be sold at the fixed price of Dh290,000.

The provision of cheap housing is part of the “Cities without Slums” programme initiated in 2004. More than 30 slums have been cleared, but many remain. The government aims to move 280,000 households out of the shanty towns.

The government has in recent years turned its attention to clearing slums after 14 suicide bombers from a shanty town outside Casablanca killed 45 people, including themselves, in 2003. Some of the larger slum communities had become breeding grounds for extremism, spread by unauthorised mosques preaching admiration for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

The construction of low-income housing, however, had flagged after earlier tax breaks for developers were withdrawn in 2008, and even the cheapest housing is beyond the means of many slum dwellers.

The government now plans to spend $7.5bn during the next decade on low-cost housing and its slum clearance programmes.

It has also been encouraging mortgage providers to lend to lower-income families. In 2004 the government set up Fogarim, a guarantee fund, which is used to underwrite 70 per cent of the sum loaned. It is funded by a levy of about $12 on every tonne of cement sold in the country.

“This makes banks more comfortable about lending even to those who do not have a regular pay cheque,” says Youssef Benkirane, head of brokerage at BMCE Capital.

As a barrier to speculation, owners of the low-cost homes are not allowed to sell for four years.

For those who cannot afford the monthly mortgage payments of $120, which are the norm for the low-cost units such as those sold by Addoha, there is an alternative scheme that offers subsidised homes costing about $19,000.

Mr Benkirane says that the scheme has worked well during the past five years, and adds that the rate of non-performing loans has been less than 1 per cent – “because people do not want to lose their flats”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

From the Slums of Casablanca

Here is one of those "feel good" pieces from Time Magazine on "battling extremism" in Morocco which means different things to different people. A lot of the time it means giving victory to secularism and encouraging docile "citizens." Somehow analysis of the situation is always about poverty and fundamentalist religious philosophy and not about authoritarian rule or corrupt Western backed (and armed) governments. Wow.

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Combatting Extremism in Casablanca

By MARISA MAZRIA-KATZ Wednesday, Jul. 15, 2009

Entering the Ben M'Sik caves on the outskirts of Casablanca, a visitor goes through a hole in a crumbling concrete wall and down a flight of stairs covered in a slippery layer of mold. At the bottom lies a dimly lit room that houses roughly 100 people. The walls are splintered, the floor damp, and thick blue tarpaulins, pregnant with leaking water, hang from the ceiling. Every morning, the people who call this place home stuff their mattresses into a corner to turn the single 97-sq.-ft. (9 sq m) room into their kitchen, washroom and dining area.

In this city of about four million, Morocco's biggest, thousands of people live in suburban shantytowns and slums. The urban squalor and poverty fuel extremism; the suicide bombers who killed a total of 48 people in attacks on downtown Casablanca in 2003 and 2007 all grew up in such places. While Moroccan authorities claim to have eradicated terrorism cells in the country's most depressed urban areas, millions of residents remain cripplingly poor. Unemployment in the slums stands at 32%. And the illiteracy rate of 64% is more than 10 points higher than the rest of Casablanca's.

Community organizer Boubker Mazoz knows these neighborhoods well. For seven years he has been wandering through the city's slums and reaching out to Casablanca's severely disaffected. When he arrives at dilapidated homes where food and money are scarce, his hosts serve him tea and honey-drenched bread. "I am after those who are left aside, forgotten, marginalized," says Mazoz, 58, whose day job is public-affairs specialist with the U.S. Department of State. "With some help, these people can produce miracles."

Mazoz believes Casablanca's bombings "could have been avoided entirely if we had just paid attention to these people." Within weeks of the 2003 attacks, he began devising ways to keep the slums' marginalized youth from turning to terrorism. Three years later, with the help of private funding and the town's mayor, Mazoz built the Sidi Moumen Cultural Center on the site of a former garbage dump in one of Casablanca's poorest ghettos. The center boasts a library, computers and a theater, and serves as headquarters for a corps of community organizers dedicated to luring impoverished kids away from drugs and extremism with educational and artistic projects.

Instead of recruiting privileged volunteers who live miles away, Mazoz is determined his organizers should hail from the slums he is targeting. "No one can speak the language better," he says. By creating role models who work and live in the community, Mazoz hopes the impact of his pioneering program will endure. "I ask my organizers, 'Do you really think it's only drugs or extremism left for you? You can be better. You can be the politicians of tomorrow,'" he says.

Now the lessons learned in Casablanca are being applied elsewhere. The project has proved so successful — over 150 volunteers have joined to mentor around 350 kids so far — it has caught the attention of Casablanca's sister city, Chicago, the old stomping ground of the world's most famous community organizer, U.S. President Barack Obama. This September, a delegation of high school students from Chicago will visit Sidi Moumen to study Mazoz's methods and implement them in deprived neighborhoods back home. "The grand vision is to make his endeavor into an international model," says Marilyn Diamond, co-chair of the Chicago Casablanca Sister Cities International Program.

The day I arrive to see Mazoz's project at work, four local girls are performing a short play about the birth of Islam. Playing the part of a queen is 11-year-old Ikram Malki. Her eyes flutter under a thick coat of turquoise eye shadow; on her head sits a crown of sequined plastic flowers. After she takes a bow, I ask about her experience with Mazoz. "There was a vacuum in my heart before he came along," she says. "This program filled the emptiness." And what does she want to be when she grows up? "A community organizer," she replies.

Real Estate Crisis Aids Slum Clearance in Morocco

Sometimes a bad wind can blow something good your way. The following article is from Reuters about how the real estate crisis is turning developers' attentions in Morocco to participating in the government plan to build affordable housing for former slum dwellers. From what I have seen, they do make the new apartments super-tiny though and kind of life-less. In the US we are just moving away from the disastrous experiment of "public- housing," but it seems as if Morocco will experiment with it for a while.
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Real estate downturn boosts Morocco slum clearance
Fri Apr 24, 2009 8:04am EDT

By Tom Pfeiffer and Zakia Abdennebi


SIDI MOUMEN, Morocco, April 24 (Reuters) - A slumping world real estate market has given new impetus to Morocco's plans to demolish its shanty towns, where decades of state neglect have bred despair and religious extremism.

As demand for luxury homes and tourist facilities falls in the wake of the global financial crisis, Morocco's property firms are making the most of a state-backed scheme to rehouse 4 million slum dwellers in new flats.

Developers are offered cut-price land if they sell some floors of their apartment blocks to slum families below the market price. The families receive grants to help them pay.

Thirty towns have been cleared of slum areas since 2004 and 50,000 shacks were destroyed last year, Housing Minister Taoufiq Hejira said in January. He is aiming for similar numbers in 2009.

Zahidi Elarbi, a member of a voluntary development association in the Casablanca suburb of Sidi Moumen, said about half the residents of its most notorious slums -- Thoma and Douar Esquila -- have been rehoused.

"Sidi Moumen has completely changed, although there is still a severe lack of services," said Zahidi.

Poverty and joblessness were still a serious problem, he said, "but better to be idle in a new apartment than a slum".

King Mohammed has announced the construction of 130,000 social housing units worth $1.83 billion by 2012 and several firms including Morocco's biggest real estate developer Addoha have announced a new focus on low-income housing.

The north African country's biggest building materials manufacturer, Lafarge Ciments, says demand for its cement is likely to grow this year thanks to the social housing projects.

SOCIAL STABILITY

The scheme was launched after 14 young men from the slums set off bombs in the centre of Casablanca in May 2003, killing 45 people including themselves.

It was a shock for a country proud of its social stability and showed the growing influence of radical Islamic preachers in neighbourhoods abandoned by the state.

Most of the bombers were from Sidi Moumen, home to thousands of breeze-block shacks with metal roofs held down by rocks.

Barefoot children hop between stagnant puddles in narrow alleyways, past sheep and cows picking over piles of rubbish. Young men feed and clothe their families by shining shoes or selling offal, fruit and herbs from carts and recycling scrap metal.

Winter floods send rats scurrying through living rooms and in summer the sun beats down on the corrugated iron roofs, turning homes into ovens.

Several unofficial mosques opened in Sidi Moumen in the 1990s, some with radical imams who organised vigilante squads to patrol the slums and punish crime and immoral behaviour.

The mosques were closed or demolished after the 2003 attacks, when the state tightened control over religious preaching.

More radicalised youths from Sidi Moumen blew themselves up in 2007, killing a police officer, and for many Moroccans Sidi Moumen is still a byword for extremism.

"When a bus passes by with Sidi Moumen marked as its destination, passers-by sometimes shout 'Boom!'," said former resident Saida Fikri.

Young men from the slums say the police still avoid their neighbourhoods and basic services are still lacking.

GUARDED OPTIMISM

Whereas promises to rehouse the slum dwellers were once dismissed as a bad joke, today there is guarded optimism.

Fikri teamed up with another slum dweller to buy two floors of an apartment block on an estate on the edge of Casablanca. They paid 70,000 dirhams ($8,000) of which the state gave back 30,000.

The stigma attached to Sidi Moumen's slums made it impossible for Fikri's family to improve their lot, she said. Her brother, a policeman, applied for a visa to travel abroad but never received it, she believes because of the address on his identity card.

"With an address like that, my children could never find work," she said.

French colonialists coined the term "bidonville" (shanty town) in Morocco almost a century ago when Casablanca construction workers threw up shacks as temporary accommodation.

Slums can be found anywhere in Morocco's northern towns, near motorways, railways and supermarket car parks, in the shadow of luxury villas and on the Atlantic seafront in the capital, Rabat.

Previous eradication programmes failed as officials kept turning a blind eye to illegal building in return for a cash bribe.

Entire neighbourhoods mushroomed without proper planning including Lahraouiyine in Casablanca, nicknamed "The Chechens" for its chaotic, bombed-out appearance.

Police made 118 arrests this year in a crackdown on corruption, influence-peddling and unauthorised building in Lahraouiyine.

Today, many slum-dwellers are reluctant to leave, fearing the new apartments are too small for their large families or demanding compensation for the land they are vacating.

Some born and raised there are daunted by the anonymous apartment blocks, where friendships and support networks needed to survive poverty must be rebuilt from scratch.

"I'm not saying it's all peace and love around here," said jobless electrician Aziz Dhahabi, 25. "But if someone falls ill, he gets all the solidarity and support he needs from his neighbours. That's not something you find elsewhere." (Writing by Tom Pfeiffer; editing by Andrew Dobbie)