Continued irrational exploitation of water provokes anger among civil society groups, amid demands to adopt a new water policy

Agadir24

The Moroccan association “Attac” expressed its discontent with the continued irrational exploitation of water despite the recognition of the water crisis that the Kingdom is witnessing.

In this context, the association revealed in an article that “economic policies in Morocco are based on perspectives that do not, in reality, give much weight to a real solution to the water problem, despite the official recognition of the depth of the problem and the catastrophic consequences.”

The association explained in the article published on its official website that “the policies on which the Green Plan and the Green Generation were built were based on stimulating and encouraging an agricultural policy directed towards export, and on the widespread and almost criminal exploitation of surface and groundwater resources,” noting that these practices are still in place and ongoing.

On the other hand, ATTAC reported that “the tourism policies launched by the Blue Plan are still based on encouraging a tourism style that causes water waste, and this is clearly evident in major projects: such as golf courses and swimming pools,” expecting this trend to deepen due to Morocco hosting the World Cup in 2030.

The association concluded that the discourse of Moroccan officials and experts has become filled with terms such as “real crisis,” “critical situation,” and “worrying situation” when talking about the state of water resources after successive years of drought, without this being an introduction to rebuilding water policies on new foundations.

The same source stressed that this speech “was only a prelude to imposing some measures that limit popular water consumption for daily life purposes, as a set of measures were imposed, such as closing public baths and imposing a cut in the daily period for supplying water in homes.”

The association considered that confronting structural drought requires “enacting a new water policy that is truly sustainable and guarantees sovereignty in the field of water,” with the necessity of breaking with “any perspective that turns water into a commodity, by preventing private capital from investing in it, and making water a shared public resource managed with the highest degree of popular oversight.”