Beyond Ngoization of Women’s Rights: Moroccan Farmers and the Politics of Land Tenure Reforms

This presentation attempts to engage with an ongoing collective Moroccan women’s mobilization around issues pertaining to communal land rights. While this presentation will include official state and urban feminists narratives about women’s rights and land, it will be mainly guided by small women farmers' stories around land tenure and agrarian change in Morocco during the last two decades. This paper relies on participant observation of workshops attended by local women farmers about new land tenure reform laws and policies as well as in-depth interviews with these women farmers in different parts of rural Morocco. Focus will be laid on how these women farmers interact with, support and challenge mainstream urban state feminists narratives about land tenure and agrarian change in general and women’s new land right status in particular. The presentation explores how local women farmers are negotiating with dominant land tenure policies and feminist rhetoric staged by the government, donors, and women’s rights NGOs regarding the representation of women’s land rights. Among the questions the presentation attempts to answer is how women’s rights rhetoric interacts with and supports neoliberal land tenure reforms and, more specifically, how the alliance between feminism and corporate capitalism is at once received and undercut by local women farmers.