Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa

6: Decolonization, the Colonial Narrative, and Environmental Policy Today

CH A P T E R 6 Decolonization, the Colonial Narrative, and Environmental Policy Today THE SPURIOUS COLONIAL STORY of North Africa’s long environmental decline at the hands of the“natives”informed and motivated much of the French venture in the Maghreb for over a hundred years. This declensionist narrative incorrectly blamed the North Africans, and especially pastoralists, for deforesting and desertifying the former granary of Rome, following the“Arab invasion”of the eleventh century. Building on an earlier European narrative highlighting the fertility of the Maghreb, the environmental narrative was variously shaped, early in the colonial period, by different actors for a wide variety of reasons. It was used to justify property laws that disenfranchised the North Africans and facilitated the sedentarization of nomads, to instigate reforestation schemes, and to justify draconian forestry laws, in addition to being actually incorporated into these laws. Late in the colonial period the narrative was rationalized, formalized , and institutionalized in the young science of plant ecology, a key development that ensured the long legacy of the narrative. Throughout the colonial period, this declensionist narrative served three primary purposes: Davis.165-176 5/25/07 10:23 AM Page 165 the appropriation of land and resources; social control (including the provision of labor); and the transformation of subsistence production into commodity production. In all of these areas, French colonial interests almost invariably triumphed over indigenous interests. In Algeria, for example, near the end of the colonial period (in the early 1950s), the European population accounted for about 10 percent (984,000) of the total population, and only 3.5 percent of the agricultural population , yet it controlled approximately 38 percent of the best agricultural land (2,818,000 hectares), with an average of ninety hectares of land per person.1 The Algerians, accounting for about 90 percent (8,546,000) of the total population, owned 62 percent of the arable land, with an average of only thirteen hectares of land per person.2 Similarly, 75 percent of irrigated crop land (the most productive agricultural land) was owned by Europeans .3 Nearly all of this arable land was located in the northern part of Algeria. In addition to the nearly three million hectares of land owned outright by Europeans (including 211,000 hectares of forest), the Algerian state and the communes owned a further 7,235,000 hectares, constituting about half of all the land in northern Algeria.4 The Algerians owned only 12.5 percent of forested lands, the state owned 72.5 percent, and the final 15 percent were owned by colonists and large European companies.5 In the pastoral sector, the nomads had been reduced to only 5 percent of the population, whereas they had accounted for about 60 to 65 percent of the population in 1830.6 Livestock owned and raised by Algerians declined significantly between the 1880s and the 1950s. Sheep owned by Algerians, for instance, were estimated at about 10.5 million in 1887 but only at about 3.8 million in 1955.7 An unknown amount of the best grazing lands had been appropriated for colonial agriculture. At independence, the situation was similar in Tunisia, where the Europeans, only 6.7 percent of the total population of 3.8 million, owned 22 percent (850,000 hectares) of the best arable land in the country.8 The average French holding was 250 hectares while the average Tunisian holding was only six hectares.9 The Tunisian government owned all of the 754,000 hectares of forested land, since communal forests for the Tunisians were not recognized by the state.10 Nearly all the nomads in Tunisia had been forced to sedentarize. One French scholar has described this inexorable process as one in which the pastoralist way of life “was degraded into a miserable sedentarization.”11 In Morocco, just prior to independence, the European settlers represented about 4 percent of the total population (8.6 million) but owned 166 | Resurrecting the Granary of Rome Davis.165-176 5/25/07 10:23 AM Page 166 about 15 percent (1,017,000 hectares) of the best agricultural land.12 The average European holding was about 170 hectares, whereas the average holding for most Moroccans was less than five hectares.13 Although Europeans accounted for only 0.5 percent of Morocco’s landowners, they owned 47 percent of all irrigated land (35,800 hectares) in the protectorate .14...