Launched immediately after Moroccan independence in 1956, a popular rebellion in the Rif Mountains in the country’s north posed a significant challenge to the ‘Alawi monarchy. After violently suppressing it, the Moroccan state anxiously sought to solidify its control of the rural region, which bordered the country’s agricultural heartland, the Sebou River basin. International assistance was vital to this project. This paper critically examines the role the forestry division of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization played in the unparalleled extension of state power over the Rif. This paper, based on original research conducted at FAO archives, explores the international development organization’s focus on “developing people” in its first two major projects in Morocco. Employing spearhead zones reminiscent of the French protectorate’s tache d’huile approach to rural modernization, FAO and the Moroccan state attempted to transform individual economic behavior as part of a broader strategy of political and economic control. The forestry division aimed to make pastoral populations sedentary by encouraging the plantation of orchards and other trees. Such tree cover was also supposed to reduce the rate of soil erosion, which at times put so much silt in the Sebou River that large plumes of dirt appeared in the Atlantic Ocean at its mouth. As King Hassan II (1961-1999) solidified his rule with the help of wealthy French and Moroccan landowners, the FAO mission shifted toward agricultural improvement in the rich plains to the Rif’s south, and by the end of the 1960s, FAO itself admitted that the Rif project was not successful. The “modest” results of the project notwithstanding, the imposition of an economic development programme on the “difficult” Rif helped the state elaborate its political authority there, an instrument-effect that recalls James Ferguson’s “anti-politics machine.” As the broader infrastructure of international development emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, it often enabled the resurrection of colonial policies in newly independent states; the recruitment of “a lot of expatriate technical experts with a wealth of experience of working in the tropics,” as one FAO forester later put it, facilitated this process. This study of the relationship between FAO foresters, the Moroccan state and the population of the Rif immediately following the end of French colonial rule throws into stark relief the European and colonial approaches to rural control that the post-1945 international development system has perpetuated in Morocco and elsewhere in Africa and Asia.