Of Kif & Remittances

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Overdue apologies for the lack of new content at PF dear readers! Between our horror at the crisis in the stock market, our shock at the rise of Sarah Palin, and the delicious pleasure of rooting for the Red Sox in yet another division championship we have all been a little distracted over at PF and haven’t had the chance to write for a good while.  Now that we’ve got the mea culpas out of the way we can dig into an interesting Maghreb issue that combines two seemingly distinct but connected goods: hashish and migrants.

Migrants: I recently stumbled across an excellent recent report, by Hein de Haas from Radboud University Nijmegen, on the indispensable migration site migrationinformation.org The statistic that most jumps out from Haas’ excellent study of the changing nature of Moroccan migration is this interesting tidbit, “Receiving $3.6 billion in official remittances in 2003, Morocco was the fourth largest remittance receiver in the developing world.”  Given that measuring remittances is a tricky business we can be sure that the IMF’s current estimate that remittances constitute 9% of Moroccan GDP is actually low. That’s a lot of money especially for a small country which is otherwise dependent on two other major industries: phosphates and tourism for revenue. While the math in these estimates is always a bit fuzzy according to Haas’ report there are 3 million Moroccans living abroad or something close to 10% of the population.  Now, you don’t have to be an economist, (which is good because I am most definitely not) to realize that this is a lot of revenue coming back into the country and a tremendous boost to Morocco especially given that the two other major sources of domestic income are so dependent on the well being of external markets. Remittances give Morocco a regular, fairly steady, and critical boost of cash that it desperately needs especially if fewer tourists decide to holiday in Marakesh this year due to the current credit crunch.  Given this critical flow of cash it’s interesting to examine Moroccan incentives for cracking down on illegal immigration which has been a major focus of negotiations with the EU in recent years.

This is ongoing research on my part but I for one have to say that I am not too surprised that in a quick survey of reports of successful interventions on the part of the Moroccan Navy in the last few years stopping or capturing illegal immigrants either to Spain or the Canaries most of the articles that I have read make mention of a high number of “sub-Saharan” Africans detained but rarely mention illegal Moroccan migrants.  It seems clear that despite the worsening economic conditions in Spain, Moroccans are probably still traveling in significant numbers to Europe– so I doubt it’s that smugglers aren’t taking Moroccans over, but rather that it’s in Morocco’s interest to be rather selective in which smugglers they interdict.  Of course not all, or even most remittances from abroad, come from illegal Moroccan migrants but it seems that capturing and sending sub-Saharan Africans home or simply letting them go allows the Moroccan officials to give Spain and the EU hard numbers and point to the success of their growing naval presence in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and reassure European allies that migrants or asylum seekers from Mali, Nigeria, and Coite d’Ivoire aren’t going to be washing up on the Canary Islands and spoiling anyone’s holiday in the sun while simultanesouly allowing Moroccans to get through to Europe and contining a critical stream of money which if it were to cease, would be devastating for the Moroccan economy. Even in a year, like this one, where I would expect to see a downturn in Moroccan (indeed probably global) remittances it’s going to be a big blow and unless something unforseen picks up you can expect this year to be a tough one for Morocco economically.  Given how little wiggle room there is for Morocco’s economy you have to wonder why on earth Morocco would be motivated to stop one of their most lucrative exports: people.

Take a stroll up the mountain outside of Chefchouen and you'll probbably see something like this

Hashish: Much has been written on the vitality, robustness and well being of the Moroccan hashish industry. Famously King Muhammed V permitted the cultivation of hash, known as “Kif” locally, in 1956 after trouble in the Rif region, located in the mountainous northeast of the country, over the French prohibition of kif cultivation threatened the stability of the region.  You can read an interesting history here on the long tradition of kif cultivation in Morocco (in French) but given this history it shouldn’t be surprising that the illegal sale and export of hash is a signficant industry today.  UNDOC estimates the total cash economy of the hash industry at 12.5 billion, and this is even given a reduction in the total amount of “the cannabis-cultivated land in the north of the country from 134,000 to 76,000 hectares.” Given the considerable size of the industry it is perhaps not a shocker to learn that there have been periodic charges that various important Moroccan officials have gotten involved in the traffic of hashish, including most famously the head of the former King’s Security Haj Mediouri (see an interesting article in MERIP here.)

The comparison here is pretty obvious: what incentive does Morocco have, apart from maintaining its good relations with the EU, to really crack down on the exportation of people or hashish? For a country that, while significantly better off than much of North Africa, is still struggling to develop, with a GDP of approximately USD $50 billion, Morocco would be crazy to significantly reduce two critical streams of income especially if doing so would risk ratcheting up tensions in the Rif or reducing even slightly the amount of remittances the country receives each year.  Who cares that these are two illicit economies that are a major EU security headache? People and narcotics are two well established and hugely profitable Moroccan exports and as such are not likely to vanish anytime soon.  Recent allegations that the sale of hashish has been used to  fund terrorist operations might get the US to weigh in and try to put pressure on Rabat to do more to reduce kif production and I wouldn’t be surprised if the current bilateral discussions with the EU over the creation of a free trade zone didn’t include demands for concessions about cutting down on both hashish and illegal immigrants but given the current economic realities, the lack of the development of economic alternatives, and no strong incentive for the Moroccan government to significantly crack down no one should be surprised to see these two industries growing healthily into the future.

-C

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Filed under Morocco, North Africa, Security

Tags: Kif, Migration, Morocco