Morocco has a strong vision and ambitious targets for developing its horticulture and agriculture to an export market like Europe. To achieve this, important hurdles will have to be taken and some big steps in terms of education, governance, and innovation are being taken. The Dutch greenhouse industry has been involved for a long period of time in facilitating some of these developments. The main question is now how to implement a sustainable and economically viable horticulture section, and what does such a sector look like. For this Thesis Lab we define four challenges, which we invite students to apply for: 

(1) Water availability - The first and possibly largest hurdle is the limited water availability, crucial to increased productivity. While all partners are aware of this constraint, the availability of area-specific information is highly limited and scenario analyses on the topic are few. Important topics to be addressed in this thesis lab are therefore to create a better quantitative understanding of water availability and its prospected changes in the future for different scenarios of horticulture development, urbanization, and climate change.  

(2) Sustainable cultivation - A related challenge to (1) is to come up with sustainable cultivation technologies, particularly for strawberries and berries, that demand less water. These need to realistically be applied in the Rabat region, taking into account the level of technology available (connected to challenge 4). 

These two research questions can be studied in one or two thesis assignments, depending on the time and motivation of the student(s).