Extracting the resource, extracting from the conflict. Regulating the overexploitation of mines and groundwater in Morocco

Unlike in Latin America, anti-extractivist movements are rare in Morocco. Social peace prevails in many extractive industries. When they do become more acute, the social conflicts generated by this regime of accumulation are still framed, for the most part, as conflicts over the distribution of the benefits and costs of extraction, without questioning the legitimacy of maximum use of natural resources as such. The comparison of the mining industry with groundwater use for irrigation leads us to identify two preconditions for anti-extractivist movements. First, the economic polarization generated by these activities must be sufficiently pronounced to allow for the formation of a collective identity as subalterns (a polarization that was observed historically in mining, and today in broader mining territories, but not in agriculture). Secondly, policies of economic diversification must already be implemented, so as to make the prospect of non-extractivist development socially imaginable by the local population (which is hardly the case either for the mines or for irrigated agriculture). Displacing the political analysis of extractivism from Latin America to Morocco thus raises new questions about the economic and political preconditions of anti-extractivist movements, and about the articulation of these preconditions.