L’urbanisation, facteur de développement ou d’exclusion de l’agriculture familiale en périphérie des villes : Le cas de la ville de Meknès, Maroc

Various factors such as relocation of poor populations policies, promotion of land rights privatization, and, more generally, economic growth fostered urban sprawl in main Maghreb cities, including Meknès, Morocco. This urbanization increases at the expense of high potential agricultural land, despite preservation laws for agricultural land. In Meknes, family farmers settled in city outskirts provided most of building land. This article presents the diversity of land tenure strategies adopted by these farmers. It shows that they take into account the new actors game, as well as actors’ resistance or negotiation skills. For a majority of farmers who owned their plots, selling land allowed to invest in various sectors (transport, trade, etc.); sometimes they have invested in agriculture too, in situ or through purchasing of land away from the city. A minority preferred to keep their land to avoid sale to intermediaries and adopt a speculative strategy. Instead, farmers using collective land without private property rights, have only defense or conflict strategies; they are in a context where their ability to negotiate prices or refuse the transfer is virtually nil. More generally, these speculative processes favor land purchase throughout the plain by investors and neo-farmers in both peri-urban and rural areas. Increase of fertile land price in the periurban zone induces a similar increase for similar land in rural areas; thus it weakens family farming in Morocco as this category of farmers cannot oppose investors and large landowners