From worker to peasant and then to entrepreneur? Land reform and agrarian change in the Saïss (Morocco) Olivier Petit a,⇑ , Marcel Kuper b,c , Fatah Ameur b,c a Centre Lillois d’Etudes et Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques CLERSE, UMR 8019 CNRS-Lille1/Université d’Artois, 9, rue du Temple – BP 10665 62030 Arras Cedex France b CIRAD, UMR G-EAU, Avenue Agropolis, 34398 Montpellier, France c IAV Hassan II, Rabat, Morocco article info Article history: Accepted 22 December 2017 Keywords: Groundwater economy Modes of farming Young farmers Entrepreneurial practices and logics Africa Morocco abstract The aim of this paper is to analyze the emerging entrepreneurial practices on family farms in two agrarian reform cooperatives in Morocco. Their emergence can be explained by the constant negotiation of mul- tiple and sometimes even antagonistic logics within these farms in a context of rapid agrarian change and the juxtaposition of capitalistic, entrepreneurial and peasant farms in the same area. Through their engagement as workers or sharecroppers in the different types of farms and as household members on the family farm, the young farmers from the dismantled agrarian cooperatives participate actively in the transformation of farming modes. The porosity of the peasant and entrepreneurial worlds is the main lesson we draw from our study. There is a subtle process of hybridization between the peasant and entre- preneurial modes of farming, resulting in a wide range of profiles. If we only focus on the political dis- course, the trend towards capitalistic and entrepreneurial modes of farming seems inescapable. Nevertheless, our study stresses the resistance of peasant modes of farming that can blend with a ‘mod- ern’ perception of agriculture. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Agriculture is still the main economic sector (in terms of employment, if not in terms of share of the GDP) in many develop- ing countries today. As a driver of change and development, agri- culture is confronted with numerous challenges to overcome the issues of population growth and food security, poverty alleviation, urbanization and environmental risks. In turn, meeting these chal- lenges has generated agrarian change which is profoundly trans- forming the agricultural sector, creating new modes of farming, but also new types of farmers – which is indeed one of the objec- tives of agricultural modernization policies (Griffin, 1979; Scoones & Thompson, 2009; Juma, 2011). In many rural areas, peasant, entrepreneurial and capitalist modes of farming co-exist. Although these modes of farming refer to entirely different ways of viewing the production process and indeed the world, there is considerable overlap and ‘‘border cross- ings” between the different modes (Van der Ploeg, 2008). This leads to a multiplicity of interactions, which may be conflicting or com- plementary. These tensions are particularly vivid in family farms in Africa where several generations interact in a wider context of patriarchal societal structures that oppose ‘‘the desires of the older generation to retain control of family or community resources, and the desire of young people to (...) form their own independent farms and households, and attain the status of economic and social adult- hood”(White, 2012: 14). Some young rural men and women create space within the family farms through ‘‘constrained agency” by obtaining a plot of their own or by gradually becoming involved in decision-making (ibid). In other cases, they may look for oppor- tunities elsewhere by crossing borders, for example through paid work on capitalist or entrepreneurial farms or by getting them- selves involved in entrepreneurial farming, often by renting in land. In their study on tomato production in Ghana, Okali and Sumberg (2012) showed how young farmers engaged in entrepre- neurial farming to make ‘quick money’ and thus achieve auton- omy. Although they did not seem overly concerned by the sustainability of the intensive farming systems in which they took part, nor with their continued engagement in these systems, these young farmers did de facto stay in the village and continue farming (ibid), which may open up new opportunities for interactions between different modes of farming. The topic of the coexistence and evolution of different modes of farming gave rise to a rich literature over the past 10 years. These works focused for instance on the coexistence of GMO crops with https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.12.031 0305-750X/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: olivier.petit@univ-artois.fr (O. Petit), kuper@cirad.fr (M. Kuper). World Development 105 (2018) 119–131 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev