Agdal, the Amazigh system Morocco is reviving to protect its argan forests

Somewhere in the argan forests of southwestern Morocco, a decision is announced. For a set period of time, no one may graze their herds here and no one may pick the small, olive-like fruits known as tafiouch from the trees. 

The practice behind that pause is the Agdal, an ancestral Amazigh system returning to relevance as pressure on the forest grows. And right now, regional administrators in Tiznit, Sidi Ifni, and Chtouka Ait Baha are using it, issuing formal prefectural decrees to revive this tradition. 

The word itself, from the Amazigh language, means roughly “to close” or “to fence.”  The Agdal is a complete system of community governance developed centuries ago to manage and protect natural resources, of which the argan tree, believed to be one of Earth’s oldest and to have existed in southern Morocco for more than 80 million years, is the most emblematic.

The argan tree is found almost nowhere else on Earth. It grows across a roughly 4-million-hectare belt in Morocco’s southwest, stretching from Safi down to the Saharan fringe, and is the defining species of a UNESCO-recognized biosphere reserve home to around 3 million people. 

It produces the famous “liquid gold” of argan oil, a cosmetic and culinary staple that has made Morocco a globally important exporter, but its ecological role goes far beyond commerce.

 The argan tree is a bulwark against desertification, a source of food and fodder in drought years, and the backbone of a traditional agro-pastoral civilization stretching back millennia.

Yet the forest is shrinking. Once covering more than 14,000 square kilometers, it has declined by nearly 40 percent in recent decades, driven by a combination of overgrazing, climate change, and population pressure.

 Six consecutive years of drought in some areas have weakened the trees, while growing herds of goats and camels, including those of nomadic herders passing through,  strip the trees of leaves, fruit, and bark faster than they can recover.

Under the traditional system, a village assembly, known as the jmaâ or taqbilt would agree collectively on when a given forest, pasture, or orchard would be closed to use, and for how long. Anyone who violated the closure faced community sanctions. 

Historian Abdellah Bouchtart describes it as a kind of indigenous environmental law: “The Agdal is a system that encompasses many laws, procedures, and measures agreed upon by the community, inherited across generations, including penalties applied to those found in violation,” he told Hespress.

In the Souss and Anti-Atlas regions, the Agdal applies specifically to trees and their fruit, argan, almonds, and others. In the High Atlas, versions like Agdal Tichka and Agdal Yagour govern seasonal pastures. 

How does it actually work in the argan forest?

Under a typical argan Agdal cycle, the forest is closed after the spring fruit harvest, around mid-May, to allow herds to graze on agricultural residues outside the forest. During this closure period, both grazing and nut collection inside the argan groves are strictly prohibited. 

The reopening date varies by year depending on rainfall: as early as late August in drought years, or as late as October when rains have been sufficient. 

A study in the Essaouira region compared argan trees across three conditions: fully protected, managed under Agdal, and heavily grazed. Trees in fully protected areas showed the best health indicators, but Agdal-managed trees came in a strong second, significantly better than heavily grazed ones. 

Why did the system weaken?

The traditional Agdal was always enforced by the community itself,  by elders, by the jmaâ, and collective social pressure. That changed fundamentally during the colonial period and continued after independence, when the state progressively centralized the governance of forests and transferred authority to administrative bodies. 

The tribal institutions that had enforced the Agdal, the councils of elders known as inflas, lost their formal standing.

“The tribe was historically the active institution managing the forest domain and setting periods of grazing and rest, before these powers were transferred to administrative authorities, ” Ahmed Yahya, coordinator of the Akal Platform for Land Rights told Hespress.

The result has been, in the assessment of many researchers, the worst of both worlds. The traditional system was weakened without a strong formal replacement, and modern NGOs that were encouraged to fill the void inadvertently created new rent-seeking dynamics around argan exploitation, rather than reviving collective action.

The recent prefectural decrees from Tiznit, Sidi Ifni, and Chtouka Ait Baha represent a formal state-level revival of the Agdal principle. Notably, one of them, from the Chtouka governor, explicitly references the Royal Dahir (decree) of March 4, 1925, a colonial-era law that recognized local populations’ rights over argan forests and restricted outside herders from exploiting them.

Yahya considers this reference significant: the 1925 Dahir enshrines the rights of indigenous inhabitants and bars outsiders from the tribe from exploiting the forest. The other recent decrees omit this clause, which he warns “could leave the field open to interpretive ambiguities once the prohibition period ends.”

“The problem lies in the absence of will to implement and enforce them, due to the complicity of some local authorities,” Yahya says, adding that without administrative firmness, nomadic herders continue to encroach on argan groves and local residents’ land with impunity.