Petal power in the High Atlas

Winners of the Miss Rose beauty pageant joining a parade during the annual Rose Festival in Kalaat M'Gouna. The small town in the High Atlas mountains comes to life each year during the International Rose Festival, now in its 60th year. — AP
GLOVED and armed with shears, women weave through thorny brambles, clipping and tossing their harvest into wheelbarrows.
'Thank God for the rain,' said rose picker Fatima El Alami. 'There are roses elsewhere, but there's nowhere like here.'
She's right.
Mild temperatures, steady sunlight and low humidity make the fields around Kalaat M'Gouna in Morocco a perfect cradle for growing its signature flower: the Damask rose.
Abundant precipitation and several desert downpours this year have bestowed Morocco with an exceptional yield of the flower, used for rosewater ­and rose oil.
Pink and pungent, the roses are set to come in at 4,800 tonnes this year, a bloom far beyond the 2020-2023 average, accor­ding to the Regional Office for Agricultural Development, in nearby Ouarzazate.
The small town in the High Atlas mountains comes to life each year during the International Rose Festival, which is now in its 60th year.
From the rose-shaped monuments at Kalaat M'Gouna's entrances to the Pepto Bismol pink taxis, nearly everything here adheres to the theme.
Teenagers sell heart-shaped rose dashboard ornaments along the roadside where wild briars bloom into pink tangles. Children whirl around a rose-themed carousel.
Roadside placards advertise rose products in at least six languages: English, French, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese and Amazigh, a tongue indigenous to the region.
Outside the town, roses span 1,020ha across the region this year.
One hectare of roses requires little water and provides more than 120 days of work in a local economy where opportunities are scarce.
Regional officials say the rose industry is a prime example of sustainable development because the flowers are well-adap­ted to the climate and rooted in the culture – music, dance and celebrations like weddings.
'Roses here are perfectly adapted to the region and to the conditions we're living in now,' said Abdelaziz Ait Mbirik, director of the local Agricultural Development Office, referencing Morocco's prolonged drought conditions.
The value of a kilogramme of roses is five to six times higher than it was several years ago.
And unlike some other agricultural products that Morocco exports, Kalaat M'Gouna's roses are largely grown by small-scale farmers and nourished with drip irrigation.
Though roses are broadly considered a lifeblood to the local economy, women toiling in the fields make an average of 80 to 100 Moroccan dirhams (RM37 to RM46) a day during harvest ­season.
From the fields where they labour, the roses are bundled into potato sacks and sold to local distilleries like Mohammed Ait Hamed's.
There, they are splayed onto tables, ­sorted and ultimately poured into copper cauldrons known as alembic stills, where they're steamed and filtered into fragrant water and precious oil.
The two are packaged into pink bottles, tiny glass vials or spun into soaps or lotions.
Long seen as a natural remedy for a variety of ails in Morocco, rose-based products are increasingly high in demand worldwide.
Rosewater and oil are often incorpora­ted into perfumes, toners or facial mists and marketed for their sweet and soothing smell as well as their anti-inflamma­tory and anti-microbial properties.
Elixirs, tonics and balms were flying off the shelves recently at festival booths staff­ed by local cooperatives from all over the region.
The demand has spurred local officials to find ways to incentivise farmers to expand rose production in the upcoming years.
At the festival parade, as drummers tapped their sticks in cadence, Fatima Zahra Bermaki, crowned this year's Miss Rose, waved from a float draped in petals.
Fatima said she hoped the world could one day know the beauty of Kalaat M'Gouna and its desert roses.
But amid the commotion, she remembered something: 'The ladies who pick the flowers are the important ones in all of this. If they weren't here, none of this would be,' she said. — AP

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