Around ten years ago, a large food processing group of Casablanca asked for my expertise on the customs blocking of one of its products (frozen squid imported from Latin America) due to unsatisfactory results of microbiological testing as stated by an official laboratory. The local general manager of SGS, the company that certified the quality of the product at the start, which has been informed, then phoned me to get news “about the steps that I intended to take to resolve this incident quickly”! I received at the same time a fax from SGS France “to show me how to do that kind of food testing”. To my question of why the fax, the manager of the Moroccan subsidiary said knowingly: “to indicate how the control in question must be made; because we do not know how the laboratories of the Moroccan State do their working”. But I learned from source close to the case file that SGS France, probably judging that such precautions were not sufficient to ensure the entry of the product on the Moroccan market, and assert its primacy on the expertise of the product by the same occasion, approached a powerful French organization established here in Morocco who contacted the former director of ONSSA (National Health Security Office of Agri Food products) that ordered an additional analysis which “has been favorable” for the rapid transit of the product to the Moroccan market. My work expertise (not done) was bound to weigh less heavy than a phone call from these people! More recently, working for a company of Tetouan that exports seafood on Europe (Spain in particular), I asked them for what reason they refer themselves to French regulations in their files submitted to EACCE (Autonomous Establishment of Export Control and Coordination) while our regulations for agri food business recommends, after the 28-07 law of food safety, to refer rather to the Codex Alimentarius. Their response was that without it (reference to French standards), their products would have been denied entry to the European market! My archives contain many actually comparable examples, including some related to other African countries, which all tend to show that, as regards the food industry, which is of particular interest to the Europeans, what matters to european stakeholders is the selling of their goods in Africa as they wish and to buy raw materials according to criteria fixed and validated by themselves. But this is obviously draped in “standards” and “expertises” whose sole motive would be “the protection of consumers and the environment.” And if we dare to question the attitude of these people who give lessons, they have every time the “appropriate” response. Codex standards, for example, are often criticized because “outdated or less protecting European consumers.”In essence, European operators, based on their own standards and expertises, behave, for what concerns the import / export of African raw materials and finished products in the food industry, in conquered territory. We can legitimately ask ourselves what your Supervisory Authority ONSSA, which is supposed to ensure the application of Moroccan law on the national market, are they doing in those moments. The reality is that the agri-food trade with European countries, both in the case of Morocco and for other countries of West Africa, is using mainly metropolitan France as the access door. Then there’s that many among the current Moroccan officials or their African counterparts, who went through the public school until not long ago, concede that our school curriculum, largely inspired from the colonial era, were designed to make us learn more about France than about ourselves and, within this package, the thinking and French working approach to the point that that has become the standard for most of our civil servants. Our thinking has become confused resulting in a lack of confidence in ourselves outside the French argument guardianship. We can do the same kind of observation about all of francophone Africa. Hence the ambiguity of the attitude of our officials who want independence for their countries, but within France and who cares if the French themselves admit that their late arrival on the Anglo-Saxon is explained among other things by the rigidity of their standards and the behavior on the workplace. Some of my friends, particularly Francophiles, say that the US has not do better. It is true that after World War II, the US had occupied Germany as well as Japan and South Korea. If we take the latter as an example, which was underdeveloped at that time and among the poorest in the world, which is still the case for the northern half of the divided country, it is difficult to argue that South Korea is a country in need for the moment. Indeed, trade of the Asian country with the US alone exceeded one hundred and ten billion dollars in value in 2014! In order that this Country is buying and selling as many to the US, it took a intense preparation. Thus, between the fifties and the late seventies, the US has invested more money in South Korea than what all Africa received as investment in the same period. The European colonizers have not had less financial capabilities during the same period. But while the United States saw their interest in building productive capacities, and the resulting prosperity, for Germany as well as Japan as South Korea, so they become creditworthy partners and able to pay for the made in the US, France was interested in keeping its former colonies penniless and debilitated as far as possible. This allowed Paris at the same time to sell so many of its products, difficult to sell elsewhere, at a credit rates for which Paris was the only judge, and link its assistance to the further exploitation of the resources, raw materials and others, of its former colonies. The result, in contrast to the example of Korea, is that of the African countries in question, there are who is in a situation worse than at the dawn of their independence!
Finally, as regards the food industry, the vast majority of experts consider it concentrates most of the non-tariff barriers to trade. While regulation of the WTO (World Trade Organization) recommends taking into account “the needs of developing countries in the definition of standards”; the fact is that these poor countries, mostly in Africa, are far from making their voices heard in the forum in question. For this it is necessary that African countries realize that without food self-sufficiency, that European countries have enshrined in their constitutions after the Second World War already, it is unrealistic to think that the poor young jobless Africans will stop of dreaming of the chimera of the european Eldorado and trying to get there with all the social and human disasters that go with it. This goal will certainly require years to be reached. But one thing can be done immediately to improve the benefit for Africa on trade within the food sector with other parts of the world: the creation of an African structure that is dedicated to issues of food processing expertise.
