Foot Fishing, Tourism and Drought. Local Responses to Structural Changes from a Community in Sidi Bounouar (Morocco)

This proposal aims to present structural changes affecting the Souss Massa region from the perspective of a community engaged in foot-fishing in a small village near Tiznit. Building a fieldwork I am conducting with them since February 2023, I want to explore how these changes have impacted local food practices and the community's relationship with the sea. The community I am working with lives in an area undergoing significant social, economic, and environmental transformations. The fishing industry is experiencing formalization and bureaucratization; local agriculture, particularly among small farmers, is in crisis due to increasing drought; the coastline is being altered by the construction of mass tourist infrastructures; and the sea is being affected by climate change and an extensive desalination strategy implemented by the government along the coast. This strategy is designed to support both the growing tourism sector and the expansion of industrial agriculture in the region. Souss Massa is now identified as a new area for export-oriented agricultural production reliant on seawater desalination.

All these transformations are impacting the lives of the people in Sidi Bounouar, a small village on the Atlantic coast where residents rely on foot and artisanal fishing and, historically, on small-scale agriculture. I propose to examine the strategies these individuals have adopted to engage with, navigate, and adapt to these changes to reflect on how their relationship with the environment and the sea is shifting. Additionally, I would like to consider how international food flows can be studied from a specific context and how they affect the lives of people living in areas where food is produced for the international market. Finally, I want to elaborate on the connection between fishing and agricultural sectors, which is often neglected in the literature but is crucial for understanding the environmental consequences of the contemporary food system.