Perspectives de l’élevage pastoral dans les oasis de montagne au Maroc : des défis complexes à relever

• Published in: Agricultures (Montrouge) 2024-06, Vol.33
• Main Authors: Hamzaoui, Imane, Faysse, Nicolas, Sraïri, Mohamed Taher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Humanities and Social Sciences
• ISSN: 1166-7699; 1777-5949
• DOI: 10.1051/cagri/2024012

In the High Atlas Mountains, traditional pastoral livestock systems face strong constraints threatening their sustainability. This article aims to identify these constraints, to explore the strategies implemented by pastoralists to face them and to formulate practical recommendations aimed at improving their sustainability. To achieve these objectives, 128 individual semi-structured interviews were carried out using an inductive approach with transhumants of different profiles and young people (women and men) belonging to households from the Aït Atta, Aït Merghad and Aït Hdidou tribes. The results reveal structural constraints of the pastoral livestock systems, such as problems of succession, youth’s exodus, recurrent droughts, weakness of alternative incomes to support pastoral flocks, disruption of flocks’ transhumance corridors and reduction of rangelands due to the extension of cultivated land areas. These constraints induce the fragility of the five capitals of the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods framework (SRL). The study highlights pastoralists’ strategies to face these constraints (use of hired labor and transhumance by trucks) and shows their weakness due to the low attractiveness of pastoral livestock rearing labor, as well as its increased costs, because of the on-going global inflation. This situation leads to a marked trend towards sedentarization and pessimism among the different generations regarding the future of pastoralism. Consequently, innovations should focus on improving conditions for transhumance, regulating agricultural development on rangelands and developing proactive drought management strategies along with legislative adjustments, institutional recognition of ecosystem services provided by pastoralism and transhumance’s heritagizing. L’élevage pastoral traditionnel des oasis de montagne du Haut Atlas central est confronté à de fortes contraintes menaçant sa durabilité. Le présent article se propose d’identifier ces contraintes, d’explorer les stratégies d’adaptation des pasteurs pour y remédier et de formuler des recommandations pratiques pour renforcer sa durabilité dans ce contexte spécifique et dans des situations similaires. Pour ce faire, 128 entretiens semi-structurés individuels ont été conduits selon l’approche inductive avec des transhumants de différents profils et des jeunes (femmes et hommes) appartenant aux familles des tribus Aït Atta, Aït Merghad et Aït Hdidou. Les résultats révèlent plusieurs contraintes structure