his paper examines the ways in which Morocco’s Sahara Desert has long been a fetishized site of transformation. From the French colonial administration’s dam-making project to make the desert a site of energy and agriculture to the current techno-scientific imaginings of its potential to fuel the energy dependent country into modernity. These imaginaries have led to the slow death and the invisible dispossession of the livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers in the Draa Valley region wherein many long-standing sustainable farming practices are being threatened or have completed ‘died’ due to state-sanctioned resource allocation that privileges large scale energy development projects over farmers’ access to water. As such, this paper elucidates the ways in which the slow death and invisible dispossession of small-scale farmers’ access to water and thus their livelihood, is a result of international funding organizations and the Moroccan government’s continuous capitalist fetishism of the Sahara Desert as a gateway to Moroccan modernity.