"Cultivated diversity guarantees stable yields and a better diet"

Expert view 21 April 2025

The Morocco International Agricultural Show (SIAM) began in Meknes on 21 April. For 热博体育, it is an opportunity to discuss the shared challenges facing agriculture in the Mediterranean. The topics to be addressed include cultivated diversity, a way of making farming systems more resilient in the light of climate change. We talk to Salama El Fatehi, a researcher at Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Larache and member of the ARISER project, on seed circulation in semi-arid zones.

Separating chickpeas from the plant and screening during harvesting in the village of Lakhtoute, Morocco 漏 Wissal Msellek, Polydisciplinary Faculty of Larache
Separating chickpeas from the plant and screening during harvesting in the village of Lakhtoute, Morocco © Wissal Msellek, Polydisciplinary Faculty of Larache

The essentials

The agricultural intensification of recent decades has resulted in the homogenization of the crops grown. in Morocco, several traditional varieties have virtually disappeared.
This is despite the fact that those ancient varieties were well suited to farming conditions in the country, and often more resistant to extreme climate episodes. Research is now turning to such forgotten varieties, to bring back diversity to fields, and to tables.
To this end, the ARISER project is attempting to promote traditional varieties of several plants, including wheat, cowpea and chickpeas.

Salama El Fatehi is a teacher researcher at the Polydisciplinary Faculty of Larache. She is a biologist and geneticist, specializing in crop diversity in agricultural environments and in the way in which humans shape that diversity. She is currently taking part in the ARISER project on access to crop diversity and its role in agro-ecosystem resilience. The project is funded by the European Union and coordinated by 热博体育.

What do we mean by "cultivated diversity" and what are the current issues for Moroccan farming?

Salama El Fatehi: Cultivated diversity obviously includes crops, but also all the biodiversity in ecosystems linked to farming systems. This is currently central to several issues facing Morocco, headed by climate change, with higher temperatures and increasingly irregular rainfall. More and more often, the rains are arriving at the wrong time for crops, or are too intense or come too late. Changes in temperature from one week to the next are such that plants do not always have time to adapt, and cropping cycles are entirely destabilized by these rapid changes. As a result, it is crucial to choose varieties capable of adapting. And banking on a wide diversity of plants is safer than continuing to practise monoculture and risking losing an entire harvest in the event of a catastrophe.

The agricultural intensification of recent years has gone hand in hand with the breeding of selected seeds seen to be high-yielding. The snag is that this has depleted the genetic pool of cultivated plants, in terms of both species and varieties. Local and traditional varieties have been lost from several regions in Morocco. We are currently trying to stop such losses by means of conservation operations. This issue is closely linked to farmer practices, since most of these ancient varieties are being sustained by farmers themselves. Each year, depending on the climate or to the conditions in their fields, farmers decide what and how to sow. From generation to generation, they have developed cereal and legume varieties that are more resistant to drought or to saline soils. These practices are now marginal, but still exist within traditional systems, where mechanization or access to resources remain limited, for instance in the mountains, on terraces, where farming is still done by hand.

These issues do not just concern Morocco, far from it. Countries around the Mediterranean face the same challenges, and there is an urgent need to develop strategies to make our farming systems more resilient. For instance, this is what we are doing as part of the , funded by the , which is working on agroecological practices for growing wheat. We are making use of traditional know-how to develop more heterogeneous varieties. The genetic variety created ensures greater resilience within fields and greater diversity on tables.

Under the ARISER project, which is being presented at SIAM, you are also working on legumes. What are the issues surrounding these crops, and what have you learned with ARISER?

S.E.F.: On a cropping system level, legumes help to fix nitrogen in the soil, which reduces the need for fertilizers. In Morocco, farmers use a lot of cereal-legume rotation systems, for instance, switching crops from one cycle to the next in order to regenerate soils. Olive groves, on the other hand, are grown as polycultures, with beans, peas and lentils grown under the trees.

In addition to improving soils, legumes also serve to diversify local diets. They provide protein and micronutrients, which help ensure local people's nutrition security. They are widely eaten in Morocco, but unfortunately, prices have increased steeply because of the successive droughts. In six years, the price of lentils has gone from 7 to 25 dirhams per kilo, and that of white beans from 9 to 30 dirhams. Current varieties do not tolerate the new climate conditions well, and yields are down.

It is therefore now necessary to promote those local varieties that are more resistant, and this is what the ARISER project is striving to do. For instance, we have taken samples of chickpea varieties that we are testing in greenhouses, under a range of conditions: water stress, soil salinity, etc. This is allowing us to identify varieties, and thus ecotypes, that are more resilient. What we are most interested in are plants that will be capable of producing guaranteed yields despite difficult conditions.

The chickpea harvest in the village of Lakhtoute © Wissal Msellek, Polydisciplinary Faculty of Larache

The aim of ARISER is to identify those varieties, understand how they circulate and encourage farming practices that contribute to their use and conservation. We are working towards this not just in Morocco, but in Senegal and Madagascar, in semi-arid zones in each case.

SIAM will be an opportunity to talk with our partners about the prospects for Mediterranean farming systems. What are the pathways you are keen to advocate, centring on cultivated diversity, legumes or farming practices?

S.E.F.: We now need to cultivate diversity, in terms of both species and varieties. This means supporting farmers, and also raising awareness among consumers. If demand for a diverse range of products grows, production will have to follow. In the field, diversity ensures stable yields. Under current conditions, that stability has become a crucial characteristic, one that is just as important as productivity, since it is high-yielding varieties grown as monocultures that are generally the first to fail in the event of adverse climate conditions. This means that farmers may lose everything, while prices rise due to reduced supplies, which poses problems in terms of food security.

Legumes are in fact a promising solution for boosting agricultural resilience and diversifying diets, in Morocco and elsewhere. Banking on such crops means promoting research and genetic improvement, by identifying worthwhile varieties, as we are doing with the ARISER project. However, we also need to look at how to support product processing and marketing. For instance, local varieties could be encouraged by means of short circuits. This entire pathway will have to be supported by public policies that include legumes in agricultural development plans.

Paysage agricole, Maroc © O. Cobelli, Cirad

Lastly, we need to bear in mind that cultivated diversity has always come from farmers. It is their practices that gave rise to the traditional varieties we are turning to today. I therefore think it is vital for us to learn from their experience, since their knowledge provides solutions and innovations.