Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the role of migration in agricultural and rural change. It develops a comparative approach to demonstrate to what extent emigration conditions the changes observed in three rural regions.

Paper long abstract:

Emigration is known to be the source of material contributions and income support for families remaining in the country. In addition, it is a factor of demographic, economic and socio-cultural change at the regional and national level.

The forms of migration revealed by the survey in the three regions no longer show a causal determinism in which migration is driven primarily by the lack of means of subsistence, insofar as migration occurs crosses the different social strata. We argue that international migration in its regular form, which has become expensive, is only accessible to members of the wealthiest households.

We put forward the hypothesis that in the regions of migration the agricultural and rural dynamics are governed by several mechanisms, among which migratory incomes are included without being the only ones. Other factors make the difference: the savings made at the farm level, the social capital mobilized to have easy access to financial resources, subsidies and credit, and accessibility to natural resources (water, land, rangelands), as well as the opportunity to place a member in the administration or take advantage of an off-farm job offer at the local level and/or in urban centres.

The question is to know how emigration ‘works’ and to what extent it conditions the changes noted at the level of the households and territories of origin of the migrants.

The comparative approach that this article intends to develop is based on empirical materials, collected as part of the H2020 AgruMig Project in 3 regions of Morocco, the Tadla plain, the Upper Moulouya-Eastern High Atlas and the Oasis of Figuig.