“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 takes place this year in early June, is an annual "feast of sacrifice" in which Muslims slaughter livestock to honor a passage of the Quran 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's a major holiday from Senegal to Indonesia, with traditions so embedded that families have been known to take out loans to buy sheep.
The prices have become so exorbitant that 55% of families surveyed by the Moroccan NGO Moroccan Center for Citizenship last year said they struggled to cover the costs of purchasing sheep and the utensils needed to prepare them.
That's in part because of a six-year drought in North Africa that's caused unrelenting inflation to hit food markets.
The sheep price spikes are driven by increasingly sparse pastures, which offer less grazing room and raise the costs of feed for herders and farmers. Morocco's agricultural minister told reporters earlier this month that rainfall this season was currently 53% below the last 30 years' annual average and sheep and cattle herds had shrunk 38% since 2016, the last time Morocco conducted a livestock census.
The country has in recent years subsidized and imported livestock, including from Australia, Spain and Romania. The price of preferred domestic sheep can often exceed monthly household earnings in Morocco, where the monthly minimum wage remains 3,000 Moroccan dirhams ($302).
It's the first time in 29 years that Morocco has asked citizens to forego holiday feasting and reflects that food prices remain a struggle for many despite Morocco's transformation from a largely agrarian nation to a mixed economy whose cities have some of the Middle East and Africa's most modern infrastructure. King Hassan II issued similar decrees three times throughout his reign, during wartime, drought and when the IMF mandated Morocco end food subsidies.
Activists groups — including the country's trade unions — have protested the costs of basic food items and decried the government's efforts to curb price spikes as insufficient.