(Kelaat Mgouna) Izza, like the pickers of his team, earns 3 dirhams for each kilo of roses picked by hand, before distillation in floral water or essential oil, a precious extract sold in Morocco for up to 15,000 euros per kilo.
“We just earn enough to live”, she breathes, gloved hands against the thorns, head covered against the hot spring sun of the “Valley of roses”, in the south of the kingdom.
The harvest begins at dawn, it takes about six hours to fill the large bags that the women carry on their heads until weighing.
Izza Ait Ammi Mouh, a Berber “about 40 years old” – she does not know her exact age and does not know how to spell her name – does not complain. This seasonal work allows her to “feed her family of five”, thanks to the twenty kilos harvested per day during the flowering period of about a month.
In the spring, the heady scent of Rosa Damascena – Damascus rose, a variety brought by some travelers during the time of the caravan trade – scents the valley, irrigated by two wadis, between the Atlas mountains and the Sahara desert.
Everything revolves around this flower: the name of the hotels, the color of the taxis, the cosmetics of the countless shops, the necklaces offered by children along the roads, the monumental sculpture adorning the Kelaat Mgouna roundabout and its annual festival. which attracted thousands of visitors before the coronavirus pandemic.
Organic label
“The rose is the only way to work in the valley”, summarizes Najad Hassad, 35 years old. She is happy to have left her job in a packaging factory to become manager of the Rosamgoun cooperative, a distillery created by two farming sisters.
The pay is much better, 2500 DH / month – around 230 euros, almost the minimum wage in Morocco – against 400 DH / month at the factory. And “she feels at home” in this unit of five employees.
The distillation makes it possible to produce floral water and essential oil, sold in the shop with their cosmetic derivatives.
A gram of essential oil encased in a tiny box costs 170 DH – or about 15,000 euros for a kilo, which requires 4 to 5 tons of flowers.
Rochdi Bouker, president of the Interprofessional Federation of Moroccan Growers and Processors (Fimarose), sees the rose as “an engine of local development”, banking on the global vogue for natural and organic raw materials.
Its objective: to obtain an organic label for the entire valley, in order to promote its roses on a market dominated by Bulgaria and Turkey, the leading producers of perfume roses.
“We are lucky to be poor, we do not treat or very little, our valley is not impregnated with pesticides or insecticides,” he says.
“More investors”
According to him, we must support cooperative distillation “to improve living conditions and fight against rural exodus”.
And to increase income, we must “develop the derivatives that yield the most”: essential oil and concrete, an extract obtained by a solvent which, once filtered, gives “the absolute” of rose, highly prized by the luxury perfumery.
Exports are essentially limited to floral water and dried flowers. The rest is confidential: around 50 kg per year for essential oil, 500 kg for concrete, far from Bulgarian and Turkish industrial volumes, according to Fimarose.
“The first buyers are tourists Unfortunately, COVID-19 is blocking everything,” explains Mohamed Kaci. These forties started with a still, he now employs thirty people in his company specializing in cosmetics.
With the health crisis, the price of fresh flowers has fallen by around 30% since the last season, after an episode of increase linked to the efforts of the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture to develop the sector, attract investors, and increase yields – 3,600 tons of flowers in 2020, on approximately 950 hectares, according to figures from the federation.
But Hafsa Chakibi remains optimistic. This 30-year-old Franco-Moroccan woman created her company in 2016 after a university degree in chemistry, relying on organic, small volumes and “traditional” copper still distillation.
Her “pure and natural” floral water very quickly found customers “who were looking for something extra” in Canada, China, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands and she hopes to launch “soon” in the real organic sector. , with higher added value.
