The Argan Forest: A UNESCO Landscape Worth Protecting

The argan forest is easy to underestimate. Seen from the road between Agadir and Essaouira, or from the high passes of the Anti-Atlas, it looks less like a forest and more like a scattering of twisted trees on hard, dry ground. It does not resemble a European forest with a closed canopy, or a tropical forest with dense understorey. It resembles what it is: an ancient, semi-arid agro-sylvo-pastoral landscape whose life depends on the space between its trees as much as on the trees themselves.

This landscape, running from the western High Atlas through the Souss basin to the coast and south into the Anti-Atlas, was designated by UNESCO as the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve in 1998 — covering approximately 2.5 million hectares. It supports around three million people, sustains a slow-growing endemic tree that has been described (accurately, though not romantically) as the last woody line before the desert, and produces the cosmetic ingredient that is now one of Morocco’s best-known exports. It is also under considerable pressure. This article is about the landscape itself — its ecology, its people, the forces that threaten it, and what a responsible consumer of argan oil can reasonably do about that.

The landscape

The argan forest, or arganeraie, occupies a specific geographic band in southwestern Morocco: roughly from Essaouira in the north to the wadis of the Anti-Atlas in the south, and from the Atlantic coast eastward to about the longitude of Taroudant. Within this band the forest is not continuous. It is mixed with agricultural land, villages, roads, and areas where the tree density has thinned over time. Elevations range from sea level to about 1,500 metres.

The climate is semi-arid to arid. Rainfall averages 100 to 400 millimetres per year, concentrated in the winter months, with long dry summers. Temperatures reach the mid-40s Celsius in the hottest weeks and drop to near-freezing on winter nights at altitude. The soil is thin, mineral-rich, often stony. Very few trees can thrive in these conditions, and the argan is one of them. This is not accident; it is adaptation over geological time.

A smaller, disjunct population of the same species also exists in the Tindouf region of southwestern Algeria — evidence of a formerly wider range. But the concentrated forest is in Morocco, and it is Morocco’s ecological and cultural inheritance.

The tree, ecologically

Argania spinosa is a small to medium tree, typically five to ten metres tall, with a wide crown and deep root system. It is exceptionally slow-growing — a young argan may take fifty years to reach full fruiting maturity — and exceptionally long-lived, with mature specimens reported at 150 to 200 years. The bark is rough and dark; the leaves are small, hard and evergreen, giving the tree a permanent leaf cover that reduces water loss. The wood is dense and burns hot, which has historically made it valuable as fuel but also made it vulnerable to over-cutting.

The root system is extraordinary. Argan roots reach deep into the mineral layer, often to depths equal to or greater than the tree’s above-ground height. This is what allows the tree to survive summers of near-total drought at surface level. It also means that the forest performs ecological services well beyond the visible tree itself — the root network stabilizes soils, holds ground water at depth, and provides an underground infrastructure for the wider vegetation of the semi-arid landscape.

Reproduction is by seed. Argan flowers in spring and produces the green almond-shaped fruit that ripens over the summer to a dry olive-yellow. The fruit falls, is eaten (by goats, or by nothing), and the very hard nut inside — containing one to three oil-rich kernels — is left in the soil. Under natural conditions the nut waits for the right combination of temperature and moisture to germinate, which may not come for years. Under grazing conditions the falling fruit is often eaten immediately.

Biodiversity

The argan forest supports a specific set of associated species. Understorey plants include euphorbia, jujube, mastic (Pistacia lentiscus) and, in some parts of the range, wild olive. Animal life includes several bird species that use the trees for nesting and feeding — Barbary partridge, various raptors, and the notable Moussier’s redstart. The Barbary macaque, historically present in parts of the range, has become rare. Various reptiles, insects and small mammals depend on the forest system. Wild bee populations use the flowers and are an important component of the pollination network for both the argan itself and adjacent agriculture.

The forest is not a wilderness in the conventional sense. It is an agro-sylvo-pastoral landscape — a mosaic of trees, grazing, small agriculture and human settlement — that has coexisted with rural human use for centuries. This coexistence is itself a form of biodiversity: many of the associated plant species and animal populations exist in the specific ecological niche created by the human-managed forest, and would not persist in either a purely wild or a purely agricultural version of the same landscape.

The UNESCO designation

UNESCO designated the Arganeraie as a Biosphere Reserve in 1998, under the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. The designation covers approximately 2.5 million hectares and is one of the largest biosphere reserves in North Africa. The specific rationale for the designation is that the arganeraie is an ecosystem whose survival depends on the continued relationship between the tree, the landscape, and the rural human communities that use it — that is, the reserve exists to protect a working agro-forestry system, not to convert it into a nature preserve.

Two later international designations built on this. In 2014, “Argan, practices and know-how concerning the argan tree” was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing the cultural practices around the tree — cracking, oil pressing, culinary and cosmetic use — as heritage in themselves. In 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recognized the argan-based agro-sylvo-pastoral system in the Ait Souab-Ait Mansour area as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS). In 2021, the United Nations declared 10 May the International Day of the Argan Tree, following a Moroccan-led resolution co-sponsored by 113 member states.

Rural livelihoods

The argan forest supports the livelihoods of roughly three million people in southwestern Morocco — some directly through argan cultivation and processing, many others through associated agriculture, pastoralism, and rural services. In the villages of the Souss and the Anti-Atlas, argan is one of several rural resources; households typically combine some argan work with olives, almonds, small livestock and vegetable gardens. Very few rural households in the region depend on argan exclusively.

Historically the argan economy was almost entirely informal. Women in Amazigh villages gathered fallen fruit, dried it, cracked the nuts by hand between stones, extracted kernels, ground them (roasted for culinary oil, unroasted for cosmetic), kneaded the paste, and produced small quantities of oil for household use or barter. Any surplus was sold to intermediaries who supplied the small pre-industrial cosmetic and culinary markets of the region. Formal wages, health protection or written contracts were not part of this economy.

From the mid-1990s onward, the Moroccan state and several NGOs supported the formation of women’s cooperatives to bring this labour into a formal economy. The idea, at its best, was to concentrate value-added processing locally — so that the money paid for a bottle of argan oil in Paris flowed back to the women in Tiznit or Taliouine rather than to intermediaries — and to offer wages, literacy classes, health protection and some measure of collective ownership. Some of these cooperatives have delivered on that promise; others have not. Our companion article on argan oil discusses the cooperative economy in more detail.

Pressures on the forest

The argan forest is under multiple, compounding pressures. It has been under such pressure for at least a century — nineteenth-century French colonial records already describe concerns about deforestation and overgrazing — but the pressures have shifted and intensified in the past several decades.

The main pressures, in rough order of importance:

• Grazing pressure, particularly by goats but also by camels and sheep, on argan seedlings and young trees.
• Agricultural clearance, particularly for irrigated citrus and vegetable production in the flat areas of the Souss.
• Erosion and desertification, driven by climate change, reduced rainfall, and the loss of vegetative ground cover.
• Wood-cutting for fuel and construction, though this has diminished as gas has replaced wood in most household energy use.
• Commercial intensification of argan harvesting, which can lead to over-collection of fruit and disruption of the natural regeneration cycle.
• Groundwater over-extraction in the wider basin, lowering the water table that argan roots depend on.

Different sources of quantitative estimation give somewhat different numbers, but the general trend for much of the twentieth century was a slow contraction of the argan forest — trees dying without being replaced, edge areas converted to other uses. More recent reforestation and protection programmes have slowed this contraction and, in some areas, reversed it. The overall picture is a landscape that has been receding in some ways and holding or recovering in others, depending on the specific area and the local balance of pressures and protections.

Grazing and the goat question

The image of goats standing in argan branches has become one of the most photographed things in Morocco. It is important to be clear about what it represents ecologically. Goats do genuinely climb into argan trees to eat the fruit, and traditional pastoralism has coexisted with argan cultivation for centuries. The traditional balance — small herds moving through the forest at controlled times — allowed the goats to pass fallen nuts through their digestive systems (though this practice as a source of oil is more myth than economic reality) without preventing seedling regeneration.

What is more problematic is contemporary grazing pressure at higher densities than the landscape historically supported, and grazing at times of year that damage seedlings and young trees. When goats eat young argan saplings, the forest cannot regenerate itself; when this happens across large areas over decades, the standing trees age and die without replacement, and the forest thins.

Traditional local management practices — agdal, a customary system of seasonal grazing closures — have been an important part of forest maintenance historically, and their formal and informal continuation has been shown by researchers to correlate with better forest health in the areas where it is still practised. Where the agdal system has broken down, forest conditions have tended to worsen.

Agricultural pressure

The Souss basin, in which much of the argan forest sits, is also a major agricultural region. Irrigated fruit and vegetable production — particularly citrus, tomatoes and peppers — has expanded substantially over the past several decades, driven by domestic and export demand. This expansion has, in some areas, come directly at the expense of argan cover, either through the clearing of argan trees for agricultural land or through the diversion of groundwater to irrigate agricultural areas at rates the deep aquifer cannot replenish.

This is not a case of “traditional agriculture versus modern development.” The argan-based agro-sylvo-pastoral system is itself a traditional agriculture. The tension is between two forms of agriculture: the slow, low-input, low-yield system that maintains the argan forest, and the intensive, high-input, high-yield irrigated system that produces the export citrus. The economic logic of intensive agriculture is stronger in the short term. The ecological consequences are longer.

Erosion and climate

The wider ecological role of the argan forest — beyond its economic and cultural importance — is as a bulwark against desertification. The tree’s deep root system holds thin soils in place; its scattered canopy reduces wind erosion; its shade and root network sustain the associated understorey vegetation that further stabilizes the ground. Where the forest thins, the desert edge advances. This is not a metaphor. Long-term monitoring has documented the correlation between argan cover loss and the physical southward expansion of arid conditions.

Climate change is making this harder. Rainfall in southwestern Morocco has declined and become more erratic over recent decades. Temperatures are rising. The stress on the tree is not only from human activity; it is also from a changing climate that is at the edge of what even a drought-tolerant species can adapt to. The argan, being a very old evolutionary adaptation, has some resilience — but its adaptation was to an older, marginally wetter climate, and the current trajectory is testing that resilience.

Cooperatives and community

The cooperative sector, discussed in more detail in our argan oil article, has been central to the argan economy since the late 1990s. There are now several hundred producer cooperatives across the Souss and neighbouring regions, and the sector includes both individual cooperatives and cooperative unions that negotiate collectively with buyers.

The picture is uneven. Some cooperatives are well-managed, transparent about wages and value distribution, and have delivered measurable improvements in rural women’s incomes. Others are effectively wage-employer relationships wrapped in cooperative branding. Academic assessments — including studies published in PNAS and other peer-reviewed journals — have noted that while the international boom in argan oil has increased household incomes in some cases, it has also, in others, accelerated the very deforestation the cooperative model was intended to counter, by incentivizing over-harvesting and by displacing labour with mechanized cracking.

The most helpful frame for a consumer of argan oil is that the cooperative label is a necessary but not sufficient marker of responsible sourcing. Transparent auditing (Fair for Life, Ecocert Fair Trade), named cooperative or union of origin, and publicly disclosed value distribution are more reliable signals than the cooperative label alone. See our overview of Morocco’s beauty ingredient origins for the wider picture.

Conservation efforts

Conservation and restoration efforts in the argan forest include several concurrent programmes. The Moroccan state, through ANDZOA, coordinates reforestation, forest-management planning, and rural development in the argan zone. International agencies, including UNESCO, FAO and various bilateral donor programmes, support specific restoration and cooperative development projects. Local NGOs and community associations run smaller-scale reforestation, awareness and cultural preservation efforts.

Reforestation itself is technically difficult. Planting an argan sapling is easy; ensuring its survival over the ten to fifty years it takes to become a fruiting tree is not. Young argans are vulnerable to grazing (protective fencing required), drought (irrigation in the first years required), and root competition. Success rates for reforestation projects have been mixed. The most successful projects tend to combine planting with protection of existing mature trees and with restoration of the traditional agdal grazing management, which is often the more cost-effective conservation measure.

Mature argan trees are the ecological asset. Planting is easier than protecting. Both matter, but protecting matters more in the short term. Editorial statement — Moroccan Rituals

Consumer responsibility

What a consumer of argan oil can actually do about all this is limited but real. It comes down to buying less, buying better, and paying attention to origin.

• Buy less. Argan is a slow, expensive product of a fragile landscape. A small bottle used sparingly for months is more consistent with what argan actually is than a large bottle used freely.
• Buy better. Prefer producers who name specific cooperatives, publish auditable information about their sourcing, and hold recognized third-party fair-trade or ecological certifications.
• Prefer origin transparency. “Made in Morocco” is a very soft signal. “From the Ait Souab cooperative union in the Souss” is a stronger one.
• Avoid the cheapest options. Genuine cold-pressed argan oil is expensive at wholesale prices in Morocco. A cheap product is almost always diluted or misrepresented.
• Do not treat argan as disposable. A bottle spilled is a small quantity of the forest wasted.

These are modest actions and no one of them alone will save the argan forest. Cumulatively, however, consumer signalling matters: the difference between the cheap adulterated product and the premium transparently-sourced product is, at scale, the difference between a market that rewards the traditional agro-forestry landscape and one that erodes it.

See our companion pieces on argan oil itself, on the wider geography of Moroccan beauty ingredients, and on Morocco’s seasonal cycles — of which the argan cycle is one of the slower and quieter ones — for the wider frame in which the forest sits.