Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
CNRS – PRODIG
High
Times
June 2006
A geographer and research fellow at the CNRS in
France, Dr. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy spent years studying opium production
in Asia—from Afghanistan to Burma—before visiting Morocco
to observe how cannabis and hashish production compares with opium
farming. He traveled through the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco
in August 2005, during late cannabis harvest time, eventually reaching
the legendary town of Ketama, where the world-famous hashish of the
same name originates.
What had long been assumed by international observers was at last
confirmed in 2004 by the first Cannabis Survey ever conducted by the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which revealed that
134,000 hectares of cannabis had been cultivated in Morocco in the
previous year, yielding 42% of global hashish production, and establishing
once and for all the North African nation’s claim as the world’s
leading producer and exporter of hashish. Because hashish production
remains illegal in Morocco it is more or less confined to the mountainous
Rif region, where a long tradition of political tolerance of cannabis
cultivation continues due to a complex set of colonial, political,
and economic factors. Since the 1980’s, local cannabis cultivation
has exploded, along with hashish production—now clearly the
main economic activity of the Rif—otherwise one of the least
economically developed areas of Morocco.
Compared to South Asia, the history of cannabis propagation in Morocco
is relatively recent, dating back to the Arab invasions of the seventh
century A.D., with most historians agreeing that cannabis cultivation
didn’t reach Ketama—the mountainous Rif area north of
Fez—until the fifteenth century. The official right to cultivate
cannabis in the Rif was first granted in the nineteenth century to
five douars, or villages, by sultan Moulay Hassan and the policy has
been continued throughout the region’s long, complex, and violent
history of rivalries and instabilities, eventually emerging as a well-entrenched
industry, both politically and economically.
This tolerance was extended during the rule of the Spanish Protectorate
set up in 1912 when France and Spain overruled the Moroccan monarchy,
except for the brief period (1921-1926) during which the local Berber
tribes united against the Spanish authority, created the independent
Republic of the Rif, and opposed cannabis cultivation and consumption.
After the separatists were defeated, the restored Spanish power reinstated
the zone of cultivation, and even Mohammed V eventually tolerated
cannabis cultivation at the onset of Moroccan independence in 1956,
in order to quell tribal discontent after earlier announcing a national
cannabis prohibition.
Beginning in the 1960s, Morocco became one of the first destinations
on the famed “Hippie Hashish Trail,” but in those early
days cannabis production was geared towards making kif–a
local mixture of two thirds chopped marijuana and one third tobacco,
smoked in a sebsi, the region’s traditional long-stemmed
wood-and-clay pipe–and the only hash available was imported
from Lebanon. No one knows for sure when and how hashish was first
produced in Morocco, but various accounts point to the arrival of
Western hippies, who started making sieved hashish in Ketama after
learning the technique in South Asia. Cannabis cultivation stayed
under control in a limited geographical area until the early 1980s,
when output was increased in response to the growing European hash
market that had developed over the previous decade, a demand which
also transformed the Moroccan cannabis economy from producing kif
to producing hashish for export.
Over the next two decades, cannabis cultivation increased and spread
outside of the traditional growing areas at a time when wars in Afghanistan,
Lebanon, and Syria, plus US-led counter-narcotics efforts in Lebanon
and Turkey negatively affected those nation’s respective hashish
industries, spurring Moroccan production. In the last five years,
cultivation has reached unprecedented acreage and geographical limits,
as shown by the 134,000 and the 120,500 hectares grown in 2003 and
2004 respectively, proving that cannabis tolerance continues today
under the reign of Mohammed VI and despite the declaration by his
father, Hassan II, of a “war on drugs” in September 1992.
Cannabis cultivation and hashish production in Morocco
Both ecologically and economically, cannabis cultivation in the
Rif Mountains makes sense, especially considering the local Berber
saying that, “Only kif grows on the land of Ketama”—a
rugged relief of steep slopes and poor soils, watered by heavy but
irregular rainfall, where crops other than cannabis often don’t
yield enough to be worth the labor invested. According to UNODC, in
the Rif, rain-fed cannabis cultivation brings seven to eight times
more revenue than barley cultivation; twelve to sixteen times more
when irrigated. Such cultivation begins in early January in the lowlands,
and mid-March in the highlands, and continues until the end of the
summer. Cannabis farmers plow their land as soon as the snow has melted,
so that seeds can be sowed (5 to 30 kg of seeds per hectare) from
mid-February to late April. Hoeing and weeding begin between early
April and mid-June, prior to the removal of male plants in June and
July. And the harvest happens between mid-July and early September,
whenever the blazing sun, the heat and the lack of water cause the
green plants to turn yellow and wilt.
Cannabis production techniques have changed considerably in Morocco
over the past few decades. Back when plants were grown for local and
national consumption—mostly for kif smoking—cultivation
was less intensive and plants better tended. Small plots could be
conveniently and sufficiently watered and, once harvested, stalks
were put to dry slowly inside houses, thus maintaining the quality
and fragile potency of the resin. Cannabis crops used to be fertilized
with manure, in autumn, after harvest, and in spring, prior to sowing,
since cultivation was conducted on acreages limited enough. But now
that cannabis cultivation has spread outside of the Rif mountains,
and cultivation not only occurs on steep slopes where irrigated terraces
have been built, but has now spread to entire valley bottoms, cannabis
farming has expanded to such an extent that manure availability is
far below would be needed to fertilize the entire cannabis crop of
the Rif. Instead, crops now receive chemical nitrate, potassium and
phosphate fertilizers, which negatively affect cannabis quality and
potency and pollute the already exhausted soils of the region.
So paradoxically, we find more intensive cannabis cultivation brings
declining quality as plants are now grown very dense with the help
of chemical fertilizers, but with insufficient water resources that
force Moroccan farmers to harvest the rain-fed crops when they start
withering—not when they’re fully matured. As a matter
of fact, in 2003, according to UNODC, 88 % of cannabis cultivation
in Morocco was conducted on rain-fed plots (bour) despite
the fact that, on average, irrigated plants yield nearly twice as
much “gross cannabis” (1,270 kg/ha) as unirrigated ones
(750 kg/ha). Clearly rainfall has a major influence on cannabis yields
and resin quality, not only on strictly rain-fed plots but also, during
recent years of drought, on irrigated ones fed by water pipes, motorized
water pumps, and water sprinkling.
Of course, such growing conditions affect not only the quality of
the cannabis crops but also that of Moroccan hashish, a process frequently
further compromised by drying and storing techniques developed to
match a growing European demand. Cannabis produced for export on a
large commercial scale no longer carefully and slowly dries inside
shady houses, but instead dries in sunlight on rooftops. Plants dry
twice as fast in sunlight than indoors, but important physical qualities
also deteriorate as the sunlight over-evaporates the terpenoids that
supply the resin’s quality and potency. These days, most Moroccan
cannabis will only be stored indoors after the completion of this
fast-drying-process, where it will wait another 1-6 months to ensure
the resin dries completely prior to sieving the resin glands (chira)
and pressing hashish.
Resin collection involves a very simple sieving process of threshing
and rubbing plants back and forth on a single pore cloth sieve. By
using several different sized sieves, resin powder of varying qualities
will be obtained through this process. According to UNODC, in 2004,
100 kg of dried “gross cannabis” yielded an average of
2.82 kg of resin powder, divided in three consecutive sievings of
different extraction percentages yielding three different qualities
of resin: 1,04 % of resin sieved from dried “gross cannabis”
for the first powder quality (sigirma), 0,94 % for the second
quality (hamda), and 0,84 % for the third quality (lower
quality hamda). Quite a few additional hamda qualities can
also be obtained from successive sievings, which means hashish qualities
can vary greatly in Morocco, with extraction percentages ranging from
5 % to 0.15 per cent, meaning yields of 4-5 kg of very low “export”
quality hashish can pressed from 100 kg of dried “gross cannabis”
or 150 grams of high quality hashish, often made under western supervision
to the highest standards. THC contents can range from 2-20 %, but
according to statistics published in 2004 by the UNODC, most Moroccan
hashish—whether seized in Europe or analyzed in Morocco—showed
similar average THC percentages of approximately 8.4 %.
Thus, while the fast development of Moroccan cannabis cultivation
during the last decades has lead to a fall in cannabis quality and
an increase in quantities of hashish produced, it also seems that,
overall, hashish quality has improved in that time because of higher
care in hashish processing, but only so far as pure Moroccan hashish
is concerned. Meanwhile, the growing European demand has encouraged
hashish makers and traffickers to alter first-hand hash with henna,
animal dung, wax and other contaminants to bulk it out before sale.
And so it seems that it is in the Rif mountains that the best Moroccan
hashish is likely to be found.
