OULAD SLAMA, Morocco (AP) — Sheep come running when Larbi El Ghazouani pours alfalfa and straw into their troughs twice a day. The 55-year-old farmer had counted on selling the bulk of his 130 sheep to Moroccans preparing for early June's Eid Al-Adha holiday, but now his hopes are unraveling and he expects to lose around half of his investment.
That's because, in a surprising break from tradition, King Mohammed VI on Wednesday urged Moroccans to forgo buying sheep to be sacrificed during this year's holiday amid record inflation and climate change. A seven-year drought has decimated the country's livestock, causing sheep prices to surge beyond the reach of working class families.
“Performing it (the sacrifice) in these difficult circumstances will cause real harm to large segments of our people, especially those with limited income,” the king, who is also Morocco’s highest religious authority, wrote in letter read on state-run Al Aoula television.
Drought has driven some of his neighbors to stop breeding livestock, so he said he understood the circumstances that led to the king's decision. He still plans to breed more ewes to be sold before next year’s holiday. But for breeders like him, the cancelling of Eid festivities will deal a heavy blow.
It costs El Ghazouani roughly 1,500 Moroccan dirhams ($150) to feed a sheep for one year on a diet of straw, alfalfa and fava beans — a 50% spike from only three years ago. Now he and other breeders are preparing to wait. It will be another year of buying feed before they can sell them.
“There's a difference between the years before the drought and what we're suffering today,” he said, tending to sheep on his farm outside the city of Kenitra. “I wasted money on fodder and made an effort with these sheep."
Eid al-Adha, which takes place this year in early June, is an annual “feast of sacrifice” in which Muslims slaughter livestock to honor a passage of the Quran in which the prophet Ibrahim prepared to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who intervened and replaced the child with a sheep. It's a major holiday from Senegal to Indonesia, with traditions so embedded that families have been known to take out loans to buy sheep.
The prices have become so exorbitant that 55% of families surveyed by the Moroccan NGO Moroccan Center for Citizenship last year said they struggled to cover the costs of purchasing sheep and the utensils needed to prepare them. More than 7% of respondents said they either took out loans or borrowed money from acquaintances to buy the sacrificial sheep.
The sheep price spikes are driven by increasingly sparse pastures, which offer less grazing room and raise the costs of feed for herders and farmers. Morocco's agricultural minister told reporters earlier this month that rainfall this season was currently 53% below the last 30 years' annual average and sheep and cattle herds had shrunk 38% since 2016, the last time Morocco conducted a livestock census.
The price of preferred domestic sheep can often exceed monthly household earnings in Morocco, where the monthly minimum wage remains 3,000 Moroccan dirhams ($302). The country has in recent years subsidized and imported livestock, including from Romania, Spain and Australia, from which it plans to import 100,000 sheep this year. To keep prices steady, Morocco this year removed import duties and VAT on livestock and red meat.
It's the first time in 29 years that Morocco has asked citizens to forgo holiday feasting and reflects that food prices remain a struggle for many despite Morocco's transformation from a largely agrarian nation to a mixed economy whose cities have some of the Middle East and Africa's most modern infrastructure. King Hassan II issued similar decrees three times throughout his reign, during wartime, drought and when the IMF mandated Morocco end food subsidies.
