Women's Cooperatives of Souss-Massa: The Story Behind Argan Oil

In 2010, at the Amal cooperative in Tamanar, about seventy kilometres south of Essaouira, the women spent two hours of every day learning to read, write and count. The reason was written down plainly: so that they would be ready to take decisions.

Amal is Arabic for hope. The cooperative was founded in 1996 and is generally counted as the first women's argan oil cooperative in Morocco. That year, 2010, it employed nearly fifty women full time and about a hundred more part time.

Before Amal, argan oil was made only at home, for the home. The know-how is at least a thousand years old. The cooperative is thirty.

How the cooperatives began

Behind the first cooperatives stood Zoubida Charrouf, a chemist at Mohammed V University in Rabat. In the 1990s she worked on identifying the active compounds in argan. In 1996 she founded an association which, with development partners from abroad, set up the first women's cooperatives to use a partly mechanised process.

The association took its name from Ibn al-Baytar, the thirteenth-century apothecary who wrote down that argan is a Berber word.

The early rules were simple. The women of one village, a douar, brought the fruit they had gathered themselves and made oil to order, the old way. Every member had the same rights, the profits were shared fairly and the raw material came from the village itself.

The aim was for women to leave the house, organise themselves and earn their own income, and with it a stronger place in village life. The cooperatives also taught them to harvest more gently and brought them into restoring the argan forest.

Most members were widows, divorced or unmarried women. In those parts it was frowned upon for a married woman to work in a cooperative, so the cooperative brought an income to women who had no other.

After Amal came two cooperatives near Smimou in 1997, one at Mesti at the end of the 1990s and one at Tiout in 2002. From 2003, Morocco and the European Union put twelve million euros into a programme for rural women and the care of the argan forest. Alongside it, new cooperatives appeared across the biosphere reserve UNESCO had declared in 1998.

In 1999 there were a handful, with a few hundred women. By 2007 there were more than a hundred, with nearly four thousand members. Today they number in the hundreds.

How a cooperative works

Most cooperatives are run by women, for women. Under the model they were built on, a member receives a basic wage and a share of the cooperative's profits.

The work starts in summer, under the trees. The fruit a woman gathers on her husband's land is hers to keep. On someone else's land, by agreement, she keeps half.

Inside the cooperatives, machines took over pulping the fruit, roasting kernels for the kitchen oil and pressing. The women kept the cracking, and it is most of what a member does. How a nut is cracked between two stones, and how the oil was made at home, is in our complete guide to argan oil.

Cracking is paid by the task: by the kilo of kernels a woman has freed from the shells.

Some cooperatives take the work to the women. They keep a network of cracking centres in the surrounding villages. At one cooperative researchers visited in 2021, about two thousand women cracked at home or in rotation, because they had neither the time nor the money to travel to the cooperative.

The cooperatives soon began to band together. The first union of women's argan cooperatives in Morocco was formed in 1999. From 2003, joint marketing groups followed, through which cooperatives sell their oil together. A national association of argan cooperatives, founded in 2004, brought together more than sixty cooperatives with about three thousand women.

In March 2021 a national federation of women in the argan sector was founded, covering the provinces of the reserve. It gathers thousands of members, all of them women. The first task it set itself was to keep control of argan in women's hands.

A protected name, UNESCO and 10 May

In 2008 Morocco passed a law on protected marks of origin. The first such mark went to argan oil at the end of 2009, under the name "Argane". The same year Morocco banned the export of argan nuts and kernels, so the pressing stayed in the country.

In 2014 UNESCO inscribed argan, the practices and know-how concerning the argan tree, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription names women first: the oil is made by traditional methods by rural women and, to a lesser extent, by men living in the reserve.

The inscription also records how the knowledge is learned: by imitation and by working alongside older women, outside any school.

In 2021 the United Nations proclaimed 10 May the International Day of Argania. Morocco put forward the resolution, 113 member states co-sponsored it, and the General Assembly adopted it by consensus. Of the cooperatives, the UN says that they bring jobs to the places where people live.

What it means for the woman who cracks the nut

It shows most clearly in the kilo. In studies from 2014 and 2015, a woman cracking in a cooperative earned up to twice as much per kilo of kernels as when she worked for the middlemen who supplied private firms.

Private firms, which appeared in the mid-2000s, had taken over most of the export trade by 2013. Some cooperatives now sell their oil directly to European companies.

So when you buy argan oil, ask two things: who made it, and who the seller buys it from.

Where we come in

We develop and make our products with more than 160 women's collectives across Morocco, and we buy our ingredients directly from them.

My family is from the Souss, and it was my tribe that led us to those collectives. AZOURANE is the name of its mountain in southern Morocco, and it means "that high place".

Women in that network make our 100% argan oil: the label reads Argania Spinosa Kernel Oil and nothing else, and it leaves skin soft with a natural glow. The same will hold for prickly pear seed oil, which is coming to our range.

The women of Amal learned to read and count so that they could take decisions. In a cooperative, decisions are taken at the annual general assembly.

There, every member has a vote.