Hashish in the Rif

The Rif, the mountain range along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, has supplied a large share of the hashish sold in Europe for half a century. Its farmers make it by drying cannabis plants, threshing them and sieving off the resin powder that becomes hashish. The method looks ancient. It is not: the Rif grew kif for the pipe for centuries, and only took up sieving in the 1960s, when Europe came asking for resin.^[1][2]

That change is the subject of this entry. The older custom of smoking chopped kif and tobacco in a long pipe has its own entry.

The kif country

Cannabis in the Rif was concentrated in a small heartland. Bachir and her co-authors place traditional cultivation in about 40 square kilometres of the Central Rif, between Ketama in Al Hoceima province and Bab Berred in Chefchaouen, and note that kif smoking was already widespread around Ketama in the 1880s.^[1] The local plant was a short, drought-hardy variety adapted to the dry mountains; by 2013 farmers often called it beldiya, from the word for country or homeland.^[2]

Independent Morocco banned kif in 1956 but condoned cultivation in the historical villages around Ketama after unrest in the Rif. Growers there argued in 1959 that if kif were banned, so should alcohol be, and an army campaign in the early 1960s failed to clear the fields.

Sieving for Europe

Hashish making arrived in the 1960s. Bachir and her colleagues think the sieving method most likely came from Lebanon.^[1] Demand came from Europeans: it grew in the 1960s and above all in the 1970s and 1980s, and turned the Rif’s economy from kif to hashish.^[2] The new product never gained a local Berber or Darija name of its own.

The technique suits a cash crop. Resin glands are collected by threshing and sieving the dried plants, which is much faster than rubbing the resin off by hand. It also yields large amounts of low-grade powder, and as production grew the quality of Moroccan hashish fell.^[2] The best local powder is known as “zero-zero”.^[3]

	The old kif plant (beldiya)	Imported hybrids
In the Rif	For centuries	From around 1980; on a massive scale from the 2010s
THC	About 2.4 per cent	Up to about 21 per cent in one strain grown there
Hashish yield	14.7 kg a hectare (2005 estimate)	About 70 kg a hectare
Needs	Adapted to the dry mountains	More water and fertiliser

The hybrid revolution

The second change came with seeds. Central Asian genetics were introduced into the local cannabis around 1980.^[1] The first feminised seeds, an Afghan strain from a Dutch company, arrived in 1998, and from the early 2010s high-yielding hybrids from Spain spread across the Rif on a massive scale. Khardala was still widely grown in 2013; by 2017 farmers had moved to varieties such as Critical and Amnesia.^[3]

The numbers changed with them. Kif tested at about 2.4 per cent THC; one hybrid grown in the Rif at 21 per cent.^[3] A survey of 2003 found 134,000 hectares under cannabis, probably the peak, and official figures then fell by about two-thirds. Chouvy and Afsahi showed that yields three to five times higher made up for much of that decline, which is why seizures in Europe stayed high.^[1][2]

The hybrids need more water and fertiliser than the old plant. Bachir and her colleagues warn that they contaminate the local variety’s genes and deplete and pollute the region’s scarce water.^[1] Chouvy and Macfarlane describe soils exhausted by decades of cultivation and heavy investment in seed and irrigation.^[3]

The landrace returns

Morocco’s 2021 law licensed cannabis for medical, pharmaceutical and industrial use in provinces listed by decree, with growers organised in cooperatives. The first legal plantings used imported seed. From 2024 the regulator authorised beldiya as well, and by August it had granted authorisations to cooperatives of 1,816 farmers. The plant the hashish boom displaced has become the local variety the legal market promotes. Hashish itself remains illegal.