Comments on the Rayan Tragedy: Our Collective Failure

This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation. I saw this tweet online today with regards to the little boy in Morocco who died, trapped in that well. I don't see this tragedy the same way. I see a multilayered failure, each layer of which contributed to little Ryan's death.

Also, I just find it grotesque to try to spin this family's catastrophe into a feel good moment for passive scrollers on social media. Let me talk about some of the failures. Little Ryan fell 32 meters down that well, and nobody notices that he didn't drown. Well, that's because ground level waters in Morocco have been going down year on year for decades. Where you used to be able to reach water some 20 meters down into the ground thirty years ago, today, you have to go at least 60 or more before you can reach any water.

That means that Reyhan's father's well was barely halfway to the point of being able to reach any water. Now depletion of water resources in Morocco is happening for a number of reasons, some natural, some industrial. But either way, the government has failed across the board to properly adequately manage what is becoming a growing crisis in Morocco in the availability of water. Now Rayyan's family lives in a province in Morocco that is responsible for almost half of all cannabis production in Morocco, and many poor farmers rely on growing cannabis to survive. As while the government has long conducted crackdowns on illegal farming of cannabis, they provided no economic development programs or alternatives for poor families.

Now this is a crop that requires a considerable amount of water to flourish. There's no doubt that its widespread cultivation has exacerbated the depletion of water resources in Morocco, particularly in that province. Now recently, after many years of debate on the issue, Morocco decided to legalize cannabis production for medical purposes. That has accelerated large scale production and the emergence of hybrid brands of cannabis that require less water to grow. But due to COVID nineteen restrictions and lockdowns over the last two years, hybrid seeds imported from Spain have not been readily available, which has made the farmers once again reliant upon producing the heavily water dependent type of cannabis that they always used to grow.

Irrigation has spread dramatically over the last twenty years in this particular province, with some major cannabis farms in that province channeling up to a liter of water per day per plant to anywhere between 10,000 to 40,000 plants per farm. Hashish is drinking all of the water in that province, and larger industrial growers, landowners, and those who have contracts with major companies are draining the province dry. And they're doing it, if we're honest, so that Europeans can get high. That's where most of the hashish goes. Most of the hashish in Europe comes from Morocco, and most of the hashish grown in Morocco is grown in that province.

Now I don't know if Rayyan's family grows cannabis. Doesn't matter. Most of the poor families in that province do, and this is incredibly detrimental to the accessibility and the availability of groundwater for everyone. If water had been reachable with a shallower well, this story doesn't happen. If Morocco had developed alternatives for the economy of Rayyan's province, this story doesn't happen.

If Morocco was serious about water sustainability and the exploration of new aquifers, this story doesn't happen. If hashish addicted Europeans didn't turn Morocco into a cannabis factory and push the government to legalize cannabis, thereby exponentially increasing the depletion of groundwater in the region, this story doesn't happen. There are so many failures that contributed to this tragedy. I don't see how it is useful or honest for anyone to try to manipulate this disaster into some kind of heartwarming narrative about the human spirit or unity of the ummah. This is a story about an entire region of a Muslim country being economically and environmentally ravaged so that Europeans can get high smoking weed.

There isn't a silver lining anywhere here. 75% of Morocco's rural population derives their subsistence from farming, but the government has been criminally negligent in the management of resources and water security. Rayyan's death is emblematic of this negligence, and his entire generation is falling down a dry well because of it. Now the ummah can come together to save that generation, but we have to begin by understanding everything that has gone wrong up until now that led to Rayyan's death and thus the real predicament that our children are in.