Zaio

Zaïo, Tayyu in Tamazight, lies roughly halfway between Nador and Berkane on the Sebra plain.¹ The town belongs to Nador province in the Oriental region.² At the 2024 census it had 36,766 inhabitants in 9,646 households, making it the fourth-largest town in the province after Nador, Beni Ansar and Al Aroui.³

The Sebra plain is one of the small coastal plains on the left bank of the Moulouya, enclosed by the Monts des Kebdana and the hills of Nador; its soils are sandy or loamy Quaternary alluvium.⁴ In 1962 the geographer Roland Paskoff gave the mean annual rainfall of these coastal plains as 350 millimetres, with wide variation between 560 millimetres in 1942/43 and 150 millimetres in 1944/45.⁵

A plan to irrigate the coastal plains on both banks of the lower Moulouya dates from 1927; in the early 1960s the Office National des Irrigations pushed the work forward with the aim of regularly irrigating more than 70,000 hectares.⁶ For the Selouane–Zaïo zone on the left bank, Paskoff gave a population of around 120,000 at the time.⁷

Today two dams regulate the water of the lower Moulouya.⁸ The Machraa Hammadi dam feeds the irrigation canal for the provinces of Berkane and Nador; since April 2021 the Mohammed V dam, commissioned in 1967, has been raised by twelve metres so that its storage grows from 165 million to around one billion cubic metres.⁹

The Zaïo sugar factory belonged to the state-owned company Sucrafor, founded in 1972, which could process 3,000 tonnes of sugar beet a day.¹⁰ On 1 August 2005 Cosumar took over four state-owned sugar companies, among them Sucrafor in the Moulouya region; for 2004, 146 permanent employees and a capacity of 270,000 tonnes of beet a year were reported.¹¹

In 2024, 2,416 hectares of sugar beet were grown for the factory, up from 1,782 hectares the year before.¹² The campaign began on 24 June; 115,900 tonnes of beet were processed, yielding 18,300 tonnes of sugar, plus molasses and pellets from beet pulp.¹³ Cosumar used drones to assess the fields and for crop protection.¹⁴

Nador province had 565,987 inhabitants in 2024, 68.6 per cent of whom live in towns.¹⁵ In everyday life 81.0 per cent of its people speak Darija and 71.1 per cent Tarifit.¹⁶