< PreviousSPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 90 FEA TURE SOME TRY TO JUSTIFY DECISIONS TO BUY A COUNTERFEIT AS A WAY OF HITTING BACK AT BRANDS FOR UNREASONABLY HIGH PRICING”SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 91 FEA TURE But, whichever way you cut it, the idea that buying a counterfeit watch is in some sense wrong barely even figures, especially when it comes to dry legalistic matters of IP. Besides, that’s only relevant to modern watches anyway. The whole world of fake watches is leaning towards ever greater complexity given recent years’ growing interest in vintage watches. Frankenwatches are said to now account for a fifth of all vintage watches sold in the US. Over the course of a watch’s lifetime it’s possible that the case will have been over-polished or the dial reconditioned; indeed, send a watch back to its maker for servicing and, until this vintage market won recognition, it was standard practice to make the watch look as new again as possible. But is a vintage watch with undisclosed reconditioned parts—perhaps reconditioned long before the current owner took possession—a counterfeit? Is, similarly, a customised watch, or a ‘modification’, in some sense counterfeit? These questions are still being worked through. “Put modern hands on a vintage Monaco and it’s not exactly a counterfeit, and yet it will have a very real impact on its value,” stresses Jonathan Scatchard, founder of specialist dealers Vintage Heuer. “But the problem is that the quartz crisis [of the 1970s and 80s] caused all sorts of anomalies when so many Swiss watch companies went bust and parts were distributed and used across the industry. Authentification services have advanced considerably in recent years. But the vintage watch market has also made the question of what is a counterfeit and what isn’t even more of a grey area.” And, adds Fabrice Gueroux, assuming that we will continue to live in a consumer culture that keeps telling us to define our self-worth through our possessions, it’s only going to get greyer still. “The manufacturer can’t win this battle,” he states. “You have reality and you have PR. You see the manufacturers spending a lot of money on anti-counterfeiting tech but it’s all BS. They can’t keep up. You know the only way to tackle watch counterfeiters? It’s for manufacturers to push up the quality of their products, and to keep pushing. We’re getting to the point where that’s the only way that the fake watch is going to look fake.” for the €300 you might spend on a fake, you could actually buy a good Swiss watch—maybe not one from a top luxury brand but from what’s still a prestige manufacturer.” An affront to these intellectual property rights really can be detrimental to the top brands’ reputations too. If counterfeiters reduce the branded products’ exclusivity, people who could afford the real things are less inclined to buy them: if there are fake Rolexes everywhere, the appeal of the genuine article is limited, in part lest it too be considered a fake. Research by Moty Amar, professor of marketing at Ono Academic School, suggests that the moral disgust—to overstate it somewhat—felt towards a counterfeit not only negatively affects it use, but also attitudes towards the genuine item that, as it were, looks like the counterfeit. “A copy of one of our watches—all copied except putting ‘Bell & Ross’ on it—is a counterfeit,” states Bruno Belamich, the brand’s co-founder, in no uncertain terms, “and that is an infringement of intellectual property rights. Counterfeit watches are not authentic products but imitations designed to copy the look and feel of the brand-name watch. It’s the desirability of the brand [that we have created] that’s ‘the cause’ of the desire to buy counterfeits.” Unfortunately, further psychological studies have suggested that while the perceived risk can influence the rationalisation of why people buy counterfeits, ethical concerns—the likes of ‘what impact might I have on Cartier’s bottom line?’— don’t typically register at all. Yes, many strategies are used to dodge ethical consideration. Some see buying counterfeits as just making perfect consumer sense—they’re entertaining, cheap, almost disposable; others deny responsibility— ‘I’m merely the smallest cog in a long chain of events over which I have no influence’; while others argue that the market for counterfeits is beneficial to the brands copied. It’s a way of paying them a back-handed compliment. Others, remarkably, even see their decision to buy a counterfeit as a form of retaliatory behaviour—a way of hitting back at brands they see as acting in a socially irresponsible way through their ‘unreasonably high’ pricing. SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 92 THE LA S TP H OTO ESS A Y GU ARDIANS In the past decades, desert oases have disappeared at an alarming rate due to rising temperatures, droughts and depopulation. Morocco alone has lost two-thirds of them in the= past century. Esquire Middle East explores how a group of visionary activists, scientists and farme PHO T OGRAPHY B Y MA TILDE G A TT ONI • W ORD S B Y MA TTEO F A GO TT OSPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 94 P H OTO ESS A Y A farmer clears the soil in order to let water flow in an irrigation canal in Zaouia el Hana. Oases share water among parcels and households on a rotation basis, sourcing it from groundwater tables, mountains, rivers, lakes or springs through an intricate array of ancient underground canals called khettaras, that take advantage of incline and prevent evaporation. Droughts have always been part of oasis life, but their previous cyclical patterns allowed communities to endure them by stocking food and carefully managing water resources. Now climate change is disrupting that natural pattern by increasing temperatures and making droughts longer. A tourist guide from Jorf offers tours to a series of ancient khettaras. Many youngsters living in the oases try to earn a living with tourism, one of the few viable economic activities left in the region. Countless farmers have turned into self-taught guides for visitors eager to experience the nearby desert, but the sector is not big enough to sustain the whole region. Moreover, the proliferation of hotels is further straining water resources. Local activists are cautious about the perspective of tourism development in such a fragile ecosystem. HOPE • Ref 015 0Z6A9121 • ACTIVISTS • Ref 052 0Z6A4253 • T he world’s oases are at the forefront of an existential battle against climate change: in the past decades, rising temperatures and human activities have caused a deadly combination of droughts and desertification that have dramatically affected this unique ecosystem and way of life. The trend is particularly acute in North Africa, one of the world’s driest regions where temperatures could rise up to 5°C by 2060. Morocco alone has lost two thirds of its oases in just one century, and the number of palm trees in the country has fallen from 15 millions to just over six millions. Local activists are trying to block the advance of the Sahara by rediscovering their people’s millenary teachings and traditions, promoting organic farming and cultural initiatives to restore the environment and stem youth migration. Abdelkarim Bouarif, a 29-year-old agronomist from the oasis of Skoura, wants to promote an innovative mix of palm trees cultivation and sustainable tourism. “We have to go back to what our ancestors did”, he explains convincingly. “It’s the palm tree that bought life to this place. Without it, there would be no oasis”. Bouarif encourages local peasants to reintroduce traditional farming techniques, such as crop rotation and the use of local seeds and natural fertilisers. As massive emigration from the oasis cuts the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the other, putting at risk the know-how painstakingly accumulated over centuries, his mission becomes of utmost importance. Bouarif applies the same sustainable practices to his family kasbah, which was converted into a boutique guesthouse a few years ago. “We source all the vegetables we need from our parcels and from the local market, so that we can sustain local peasants”, he explains. “And we use the discarded pool water to irrigate our fields”. Bouarif loves to take visitors for a walk in the palm groves, and explain how an oasis functions. By doing so, he also hopes to raise awareness on the plight of the oases in Morocco. Halim Sbai, a 53-year-old environmental activist from M’hamid el Ghizlane, is trying to salvage his oasis’ rich history, which is still passed orally from one generation to the other through songs and centuries- old poems. Every weekend, dozens of children and adolescents from M’hamid gather at Sbai’s music school to sing and learn about them. Like many other men, Sbai had the chance to leave M’hamid and seek a better life elsewhere. He decided to stay and fight for the future of their beloved oasis by instilling that same love for this land into their youth. “We work on our immaterial heritage. It’s the first step to take”, explains Sbai. “Otherwise the youngsters will never even know what an oasis is”. Despite the challenges, Sbai is still hopeful about the future. “It’s going to be a long-term effort, but I love to see the smile on my people’s faces”, he explains. “In order to save the oases, you first have to take care of the human beings living there. They are the foot soldiers in this battle against desertification, and the Sahara is a quick enemy”. SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 95 P H OTO ESS A Y A little boy stands on top of a sand dune in M’hamid el Ghizlane. M’hamid, the furthest of the Draa valley oases before the Sahara and once a symbol of the area’s flourishing date trade, nowadays looks like an apocalyptic movie set. Home to just 8,000 people, in the past decades the oasis’s surface has shrunk by two thirds, and what remains is literally being swallowed by the desert. The drought has degraded the palm groves to a point where taking care of them has become almost impossible. PLAYG ROUND • Ref .047 0Z6A1176 •SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 96 P H OTO ESS A Y SURVIVOR • Ref 023 0Z6A4539 • A palm tree stands amid the sand dunes in Merzouga. Oases are based on an unique agricultural system centred on palm trees, which provide dates— the oases’ main produce—and shade from sun rays, retaining the humidity necessary to grow orchards, vegetables and forage crops beneath them. This variety of cultures used to make oases extremely resilient and adaptable to weather changes. “Pomegranates, apples, apricots, peaches, olives, beans, wheat, barley… Everything can grow in a healthy oasis”, explains Abdelkarim Bouarif, an agronomist from the oasis of Skoura. “It’s an ode to biodiversity. All plants live in synergy, with the palm tree as the orchestra leader”.SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 97 P H OTO ESS A Y A farmer pumps water from a well in order to water his field in the village of Zouia de Sidi Elmokhtar Ben Ali. In the past, water resources in the oases used to be strictly regulated, with farmers being allotted a specific quantity of water, or irrigation time, on a rotation basis, according to the size of their land. But nowadays the availability of water pumps have prompted some families to dig private wells to irrigate their parcels, further exhausting the groundwater and chipping away at the principle of collective water usage, one of the main social pillars of any oasis. A woman from Ksar Bounou pours tea in a glass. Moroccan oasis cover 15 percent of the country’s surface and host roughly two million people. Most of them lie along a wide desert basin south of the Atlas mountains, along the caravan routes that used to connect the Sahara with the Mediterranean coasts. Their inhabitants are the proud descendants of the nomad tribes that colonised these areas in the past centuries, and are viscerally attached to this land. LIFE G OES ON • Ref 014 0Z6A0467 • TEA • Ref 041 0Z6A8622 •SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 98 P H OTO ESS A Y RAIN CHANT • Ref 022 0Z6A9742 • On a cold winter morning, a group of elders from M’hamid meet on the outskirts of the oasis, right where the desert begins. Dressed in traditional white robes, they start to clap and sing to the rhythm of a drummer, intoning a propitiatory chant to put an end to the drought and bring life back to the oasis. Until the beginning of the ’90s M’hamid used to have four seasons. Rains were regular in winter, and in autumn the place was abuzz with seasonal labourers and nomads coming from the desert for the harvesting season. Truckloads full of dates were departing daily for big cities like Marrakech or Casablanca. Once the season was over, families would celebrate with a flurry of weddings and common meals. “Now, the only thing we can do is pray for this drought to end”, explains one of the elders.SPRING 2024 esquir eme.com 99 P H OTO ESS A Y OASIS • Ref 008 0Z6A1485 • A 54-years-old date trader with a contagious laugh, Mohamed Laaziz is from Tamegroute, a town of 21,000 and one of the many oases dotting the Draa river valley in southern Morocco. When he was a kid, his family fields were ripe with all sorts of fruit trees and vegetables, and palm dates—the oasis’s main livelihood —were plentiful. “During harvest season every family would collect more than a tonne of dates”, he remembers, as a broad smile lightens up his face. Nowadays, that same river is dry, and filled with bushes. “The Draa gets only three or four months of water per year”, explains a discouraged Laaziz. Most of the verdant and lively oasis he grew up in is now a shadow of itself, full of abandoned fields and drying trees. “It makes me sad”, he continues, “but you can’t fight God’s will”. Next >