News Desk :: TIn southern Morocco, volunteers are hunting for waste embedded in the sand, and they don’t have to look far.<\/p>\n
Bottles, plastic bags — “there are all kinds”, noted one helper who has come forward to join the initiative cleaning up the edge of a village bordering the Sahara.<\/p>\n
The initiative marks the 20th International Nomads Festival, which is held in mid-April every year in M’Hamid El Ghizlane in Zagora province in southeast Morocco.<\/p>\n
Some 50 people, gloved and equipped with rubbish bags, toiled away for five hours — and collected between 400 and 600 kilos of waste, the organisers estimated.<\/p>\n
“Clean-up initiatives usually focus on beaches and forests,” festival founder Nouredine Bougrab, who lives in the village of some 6,600 people, told AFP.<\/p>\n
“But the desert also suffers from pollution.”<\/p>\n
The campaign brings together artists, activists and foreign tourists, and is a call for the “world’s deserts to be protected”, said the 46-year-old.<\/p>\n
Bougrab said the clean-up began at the northern entrance of the village “which was badly affected by pollution” and extended through to the other end of town and the beginning of the “Great Desert”.<\/p>\n
The rubbish is “mainly linked to the massive production of plastic products, low recycling rates and atmospheric pollutants carried by the wind”, said anthropologist Mustapha Naimi.<\/p>\n
Morocco has a population of almost 37 million and they generate about 8.2 million tons of household waste each year, according to the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development.<\/p>\n
“This is equivalent to 811 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — enough to fill 2,780 Olympic swimming pools with compacted waste,” said Hassan Chouaouta, an international expert in sustainable strategic development.<\/p>\n
Of this amount, “between six and seven percent” is recycled, he said.<\/p>\n
– Ancient way of life –
\nTheir morning alarm went off “early”, according to one volunteer, New York-based French photographer Ronald Le Floch who said the initiative’s aim was “to show that it’s important to take care of this type of environment”.<\/p>\n
Another helper was Ousmane Ag Oumar, a 35-year-old Malian member of Imarhan Timbuktu, a Tuareg blues group.<\/p>\n
He called the waste a direct danger to livestock, which are essential to the subsistence of nomadic communities.<\/p>\n
Anthropologist Naimi agreed: “Plastic waste harms the Saharan environment as it contaminates the land, pasture, rivers and nomadic areas,” he said.<\/p>\n
Pastoral nomadism is a millennia-old way of life based on seasonal mobility and available pasture for livestock.<\/p>\n
But it is on the wane in Morocco, weakened by climate change and with nomadic communities now tending to stay in one place.<\/p>\n
The most recent official census of nomads in Morocco dates to 2014, and returned a nomadic population of 25,274 — 63 percent lower than a decade earlier in 2004.<\/p>\n
Mohammed Mahdi, a professor of rural sociology, said the country’s nomads have “not benefited from much state support, compared to subsidies granted to agriculture, especially for products intended for export”.<\/p>\n
“We give very little to nomadic herders, and a good number have gone bankrupt and given up,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mohamed Oujaa,50, is leader of The Sand Pigeons group who specialise in the “gnawa” music practised in the Maghreb by the descendants of black slaves.<\/p>\n
For him, a clean environment is vital for future generations, and he hopes the initiative will be “just the first in a series of campaigns to clean up the desert”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
News Desk :: TIn southern Morocco, volunteers are hunting for waste embedded in the sand, and they don’t have to look far. Bottles, plastic bags — “there are all kinds”, noted one helper who has come forward to join the initiative cleaning up the edge of a village bordering the Sahara. The initiative marks the 20th International Nomads Festival, which is held in mid-April every year in M’Hamid El Ghizlane in Zagora province in southeast Morocco. Some 50 people, gloved and equipped with rubbish bags, toiled away for five hours<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8303,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8301\/revisions\/8303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailysylhetersomoy.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}