Morocco: experts upbeat about desert lakes

Hope is growing in Morocco for farmers who have been battling with drought now for six years, particularly in the south of the country. Odd weather conditions which brought about flooding in recent weeks, which caused the deaths of 11 people, have created new lakes in desert areas, formerly written off as completely bereft of water, according to AP.

Associated Press journalists in Morocco, it should be noted, have a track record of making reports which please the government in Rabat and assist it with its positive news campaign in line with Morocco press, so the claims should be taken as optimistic and the piece speculative. AP in the past have even gone as far as making reports which appear to boost Morocco’s tourism sector which some critics might call “fake news”.

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AP claims that Morocco’s General Directorate of Meteorological has analyzed Nasa images and detected water in Lake Iriqui which lies in the eponymous national parc – a lake which had been dry for half of a century. The images have given some experts hope that the lake could revitalize the desert.

“There’s even a lake that has been dry for 50 years, named Lake Iriqui, between the Zagora and Tata regions, where the water has returned, as Nasa images have shown. So, the old desert lakes will come back to life.”

Houssine Youabeb says it has been at least 30 years since this much rain has fallen in the span of three months. These changes hint at more important disruptions notably altered weather forecasts.

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“The water will evaporate into the air, so there will be more moisture in the air. This excess moisture will therefore fall on certain regions and cause rainfall. There will even be a change in the pattern of precipitation. We’ll no longer have this usually organised rainfall, but rather quite strong thunderstorms over certain regions.”

Morocco, where agriculture is a crucial sector, headed this year for its sixth consecutive year of drought due to a drop in rainfall which has affected all of the north of the continent stretching as far as Somalia. The government has taken a number of initiatives to tackle the crisis, but they will take years before the results are felt by farmers who are suffering appalling poverty due to both the drought and new measures by the state preventing them from drilling wells on their own land.

AP