Paul Pascon

He was perhaps the first modern scholar to study Gara Medouar,[2] and he was one of the foremost experts on the Moroccan economy and agriculture and its transformation under colonialism and after independence.

[5] Later in life he told his friend Ernest Gellner of his family history: his grandfather, he said, had been a Pied-Noir who had acquired land in Morocco after World War I but never became a successful farmer.

[3] At age 17, Pascon won a prize for a report on the Ziz and Rhéris rivers, and in 1951 he received his baccalauréat in experimental sciences from the Lycée Gouraud in Rabat.

After a number of administrative jobs he was hired by Institut agronomique et vétérinaire Hassan-II in 1970, where he worked until his death in a variety of functions, founding and leading units including the Department for Rural Development.

It exemplifies the depth of analysis possible when interdisciplinary techniques, indigenous sources, and a creative mind are brought to bear on a single region".