Blog #3.19 Fieldwork at Argan Cooperatives

Our research team had the privilege of visiting different argan cooperatives for our study, and each was unique in our experience, their organization, and our interviews with the women workers.

Tiout Cooperative visit (photo by Isabella Guzaldo)

In Tiout Cooperative, we arrived after our tour of the local oasis and they welcomed us kindly in with bread and cookies with honey, argan oil and amelou (a mixture of honey, argan oil, and ground argan nuts). This particular cooperative was one of three in Morocco at its start (2002), started by women who knew very little about the business, but were keen to learn.

When starting out, the owners explained that they initially had difficulty recruiting women to work in the cooperatives, both due to a limited budget and a taboo against women working outside the home. However, they slowly managed to recruit and now have a cooperative of 100 women. Their determination and ambition were so great that they were able to fulfill their first international argan oil export which was a 100 L order from Japan by just using one machine.

Tree with argan parts at Tiout Cooperative (photo by Rachid Dahbi)

Being new and starting an enterprise as women in a culture that devalued women’s enterprising work, the owners said they were often laughed at by men as they worked hard to build their cooperative. They would state they were making money even when they weren’t so they would be taken more seriously. All of this was done with the drive to tell all the girls in the village that they can do anything.

Despite their hardships, they managed to grow significantly and expand. With that growth, they invested in the women in the cooperative, offering classes on literacy, numeracy, health, life, and other subjects. They offered those classes to women in need in the village as well. To promote a mutually beneficial relationship with the village, they also offered childcare to those in the village who needed it. A small percentage of the income of the women went to providing for such services and to other activities outside of the cooperative and to maintenance and preservation of the trees and affiyache that supplied the cooperative.

In the cooperative, the women had a kitchen and a break room available to them. The cooperative primarily relied upon machinery for the extraction process, however they had set up a small demonstration of 5 women making argan oil in a traditional manner, including dehusking, cracking, roasting, grinding, and pressing/extracting.

At this point, we split off to start our group interviews and we got to hear from the women about their thoughts and experiences working there. Afterwards, we visited the shop in the cooperative and took quite a few souvenirs with us.

Nico and Isabella at TIghanimine Cooperative (photo by Foundation Dar Si Hmad)

Touring Tighanimine Cooperative facilities with the president (photo by Tara Deubel)

The second cooperative we visited, Tighaminine, is located on the outskirts of Agadir. As we entered, we had to put on white lab coats to prevent contamination and began our tour. Our guide was one of the administrators who explained that the coop is the center of production with relationships to other cooperatives and villages where they outsource some of their cracking. There are a total of 705 women associated with this cooperative, 105 of which are full members and the others work in cracking centers in surrounding villages who provide argan nuts (tiznine) to the main cooperative.

The first room we entered was an in-progress lab space for cosmetics. The cooperative was ever-looking for ways to expand. As we descended, we explored various storerooms and labs. One lab was devoted to testing each order of argan for acidity and peroxide levels.

Women working in Tighanimine Cooperative (photo by Tara Deubel)

This cooperative consisted of 50 women working in 8 hour shifts. They focused on dehusking the affiyache fruits and cracking the nuts, trading 4 hour shifts for each. The leftovers from these steps were usually sold as animal feed and for burning. Another two women work using the machines for processing and quality control.

Our guide mentioned that a Ph.D. student at the university where she earned her master’s degree was studying the potential for extracting protein from the argan nut shells. Fascinating!

Cooperative president explaining the local supply chain (Photo by Foundation Dar Si Hmad)

In the next room, the machines stood, waiting to roast, grind, extract, and filter the argan oil. The only other manual part of the process was sticking the labels on the bottles.

The affiyache was collected by the women and sent to the villages (by donkey) individually for the women to dry on their roofs. The cooperative would then purchase the dried fruit back for processing above market value per fair trade regulations. Some of the dried affiyache was also dehusked and cracked by women in the villages, then sold to the cooperative. It was an impressive supply chain!

Research team by an argan tree outside Tighanimine Cooperative in Agadir (Photo by Foundation Dar Si Hmad)

-By James Robbins, PhD student in Applied Anthropology at USF and Isabella Guzaldo, Environmental Engineering undergraduate major at USF