King Mohammed VI has urged his fellow Moroccans not to slaughter sheep for upcoming Eid al-Adha festivities as the country grapples with dwindling herds due to a six-year drought.
The request was delivered on Wednesday by the minister of Islamic affairs, Ahmed Toufiq, who read a letter on the monarch’s behalf on the state-run Al Aoula TV channel. He cited economic hardship and the climate crisis as reasons for the rising prices of livestock and sheep shortage in the north African state.
“Performing it in these difficult circumstances will cause real harm to large segments of our people, especially those with limited income,” the king, who is also Morocco’s highest religious authority, wrote in the letter.
Eid al-Adha, which this year takes place in early June, is an annual “feast of sacrifice” in which Muslims slaughter livestock to honour a passage of the Qur’an in which the prophet Ibrahim prepared to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who intervened and replaced the child with a sheep.
It is a major holiday for millions of Muslims around the world, with traditions so embedded that families have been known to take out loans to buy sheep.
Their purchasing power has been reduced, especially in many parts of north Africa, where an enduring drought has intensified inflation in recent years. The price of the preferred domestic sheep can often exceed monthly household earnings in Morocco, where the monthly minimum wage is 3,000 dirhams (£240).
Prices have become so exorbitant that 55% of families surveyed by the Moroccan Center for Citizenship, an NGO, last year said they struggled to cover the costs of buying sheep and the utensils needed to prepare them.
The country has one of the highest red meat consumption rates in Africa and has lost a third of its national cattle and sheep population since 2016. In its 2025 budget, Morocco suspended import duties and a value-added tax on cattle and sheep to help stabilise domestic prices.
On 20 February, the government announced a deal to import up to 100,000 sheep from Australia. It has previously imported cattle from Brazil and Uruguay.
The king’s request is the first time in 29 years that Morocco has asked citizens to forgo holiday feasting. King Hassan II, Mohammed VI’s predecessor and father, issued similar decrees three times throughout his reign, during wartime, drought and when the International Monetary Fund mandated an end to food subsidies in the country.
Activist groups including trade unions have protested against the costs of basic food items and decried the government’s efforts to curb rising prices as insufficient.
Source: theguardian.com
