Morocco’s drought and the turn to the sea

Morocco went through seven consecutive years of water deficit. National dam filling fell to 23.22 per cent in January 2024.¹ In December 2023 the water minister told deputies that without the emergency transfer, drinking water would have been cut in several regions, including Rabat and Casablanca.⁷

Agriculture is by far the largest user of Moroccan water, which is the fact that governs everything else here.⁸ A drought is therefore experienced as a farming crisis first and a municipal crisis second, and the political economy of any response has to survive that.

The state chose supply first. It accelerated a desalination programme along its coasts, at Agadir, Jorf Lasfar, Casablanca, Dakhla and Nador, and it built what it markets as water motorways, transferring flow between basins.^9 10 The Sebou to Bouregreg link, in service since August 2023, was the emergency case, helping to secure supplies along the Rabat to Casablanca axis.^10 7

The programme is real and large. It is also imprecisely specified in public. The state auditor’s 2023–2024 report gives the desalination target as 1.4 billion cubic metres a year by 2027.¹¹ ONEE gives 1.7 billion by 2030, and the auditor’s 2024–2025 report gives 2.2 billion by 2030, the highest of the three.^12 13 Official dam figures published four months apart also imply two different total capacities: 49.44 per cent meant 6.61 billion cubic metres in April 2025, while 34.22 per cent meant 5.736 billion of 16.762 billion in August.^14 15

The transfer did its job. It moved 871 million cubic metres between October 2023 and October 2025, and on the minister’s own account it is why Rabat and Casablanca kept their taps on.^3 7

The plants also displaced real demand from stressed inland sources. The Jorf Lasfar extension now supplies about 80 per cent of the drinking water for Berrechid, Settat, Had Soualem and southern Casablanca. Safi is entirely supplied by desalinated water.¹⁴

Then it rained. Dam filling reached 70.7 per cent on 18 February 2026, or 11.857 billion cubic metres, against 27.5 per cent and 4.644 billion a year earlier.² It stood at 76 per cent on 18 May and 67.50 per cent on 1 September 2026.¹⁶ Stored volume rose about 155 per cent in twelve months.²

The economics of desalinated irrigation do not close. At the Chtouka farm hydrant near Agadir, the regional agricultural office puts the cost price at 13 dirhams a cubic metre, made up of 7.52 in amortisation and 5.48 in operating cost.⁴ Farmers buy it at a subsidised 5.50 to 6.⁵ Farmers in the large public schemes run by the regional offices pay between 0.24 and 0.77, and the raw-water abstraction fee is 0.02.⁸ For potable water at Agadir, the state’s operating compensation to ONEE, covering the gap between the private partner’s price and the tariff charged to the regional distributor, reached 684 million dirhams between January 2022 and June 2024. At Laâyoune, where the ONEE plant supplies drinking water, production and distribution cost 23.41 dirhams a cubic metre in 2023, while the average sale tariff was 5.06.⁵

That pricing sends the wrong signal to the largest user in a basin whose aquifer is in deficit. It is a subsidy for continuing to irrigate where the water ran out, and it grows with every cubic metre delivered.

Demand management takes 19 per cent of the national drinking water and irrigation programme, in drinking-water loss reduction and irrigation modernisation, but behaviour change is almost absent. Communication and behavioural change account for 50 million dirhams out of 142,695 million, which is 0.035 per cent.⁶ The World Bank had already warned that without demand management policies, the 2050 gap would likely not close even if every investment in the National Water Plan were delivered.⁸

Delivery itself has been slow, and the state auditor says so. The Cour des comptes records that Agadir took fourteen years, and that Casablanca began in 2024 having been due in 2015. Nine implementing texts of water law 36-15, in force since August 2016, were still unpublished at the end of 2024, including the one governing desalination concessions.¹³ Its previous annual report records that about 794,000 hectares had been equipped for drip and other localised irrigation, and that demand still did not stabilise.¹¹

Moroccan critics have made the structural argument for some years. A team at Ibn Zohr University in Agadir published in October 2025 on what they call a vicious cycle of supply and demand, which depletes resources and spreads vulnerabilities.¹⁷ The agricultural systems specialist Mohammed Taher Srairi and the economist Najib Akesbi have made related arguments about the export-oriented crop mix.^18 19 Among the restrictions imposed, the most visible fell on small users: hammams, whose federation counts 200,000 workers and puts the sector’s use at about 2 per cent of water, and the watermelon growers of Zagora who became the emblem of the argument.^20 21 22

Supply expansion buys time, and time is worth buying. What it does not do is change the demand that created the shortage. Morocco has now run the experiment at national scale: about 794,000 hectares of drip and other localised irrigation, a fleet of plants, an emergency transfer, and irrigation demand that did not stabilise.¹¹

The price signal is the mechanism, and inverting it is expensive. Where desalinated water reaches farms at less than half its cost while farmers in the public schemes pay under a dirham, the tariff is telling farmers to keep planting where the aquifer failed.^4 8 Any state considering desalination for agriculture should model the subsidy as a permanent operating line, not a transitional one: at Chtouka the cost price is 13 dirhams a cubic metre and the farm tariff 5.50 to 6.^4 5

Publish one denominator and one target. A programme quoted at three different targets, and dam levels quoted against two different totals, cannot be audited by the people paying for it. That is a governance point rather than a hydrological one, and it is the easiest of these problems to fix.