The entry into force of Acfta (African Continental Free Trade Area) is announced for May 30th. Needless to say, the leaders of our countries, charged with negotiating the rules that will support the realization of this ambition, have a lot of work ahead of them. They can of course, for financial or convenience reasons, call on EU bodies to help them in this task. It is unlikely that such an approach would accelerate the establishment of the Acfta, an organization designed to help weaken the economic and commercial ties that the former colonizer has woven, for his interest, around our continent. Especially that Africa needs to go quickly in starting this project to take advantage of immediate opportunities and meet the nagging need to find work and food for its idle youth. This will at the same time help to stop the hemorrhage of the emigration of the poor on one side and the African elite as well.
In commerce as elsewhere, opportunities are rarely served on a platter. We must therefore monitor the trend of the markets and deduce the possibilities to profit from them. In this respect, the United States considers, for some reasons that it is up to them now to take a larger share of world trade. This has already been the case after the Second World War. For this purpose, the Trump Administration urges the Chinese to buy more products on more favorable terms to rebalance the US trade balance. This balance is now largely in favor of China. The Chinese are obviously rebelling to show their rejection of this order. However, in terms of trade, they do not buy as much from the Americans to have a comparable pressure lever. Moreover, the Middle Kingdom has promised dozens of African countries, and all over the world, a type of assistance or another, which requires them to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars to be at the rendezvous of their commitments. China is therefore not able to intimidate Uncle Sam by threatening to sell the dollar, which it needs, in the public square. Americans are aware of it. In one way or another, China will have to resolve, among other things, to buy more from the Americans to move towards a compromise. But what China will buy more from Americans; it will not buy it elsewhere, in Europe for example. As trade has become a science in itself, the Europeans cannot, as a consequence, sell more than before to the Chinese. In turn, the EU will probably buy less from China. If this is the case, the Europeans will have to buy elsewhere the necessary inputs for the Finished Products they sell to us, starting from raw materials bought from Africa. This will push the Chinese more towards us and will undoubtedly create more friction on our trade with the EU. In short, if our partners on the North Mediterranean shore are not very competitive on African markets today, it is more than likely that they will be even less so in the years to come. So goes the world, the fault is nobody, simply the natural selection that pushes the weakest to the margin of the globalized market. This process is apparently well underway for “old Europe”.
To return to our future trade with countries other than the EU, to which our African countries must prepare, we must show others that we have something to offer commercially to participate in these exchanges. In this respect, we must be perfectly naive to consider that the mere continuation of the sale of our Raw Materials will enable us to aspire to some development alongside other countries on the planet. We must prioritize the well-studied value-creation of our natural resources as Finished Products in order to be able to sell them advantageously on the globalized market. I am reminded of this instructive anecdote. Twenty years ago, Working for PhF Specialists, Inc. (American Audit Firm), we proceeded to the HACCP * certification of Sardisud, Fish Processing Unit based in Tan-Tan (South Moroccan). A few months later, on the occasion of an operation involving about one hundred and forty tons of canned sardines exported to the Egyptian market, Sardisud had the unpleasant surprise of seeing the goods in question blocked by the local authorities. The blockade was motivated by the wording (incomprehensible for the Egyptians), on the Sardisud Analysis Bulletin, of an analysis operation called “ABVT” for “Total Volatile Basic Nitrogen» (Criterion of indirect quality assessment of canned sardines).This name, and the technique itself, is not in common use outside our (limited) francophone environment. Other direct measures of FDA-inspired sanitary parameters are preferred over “ABVT“. The problem was finally solved (after several months) by reassuring the Egyptian authorities by sending for clarification a Bulletin of Analysis in the Anglo-Saxon terms, the most used in the globalized market. Sardisud had learned a good lesson. It is necessary to produce safe food, but in order to sell it internationally, adherence to the rules of the HACCP system as defined and codified by Codex is required. The wording of the Analysis Bulletins must also comply with these rules.
In fact, the promotion of the HACCP system has focused on the safety of the product that the system allows. There has not been enough emphasis on the contribution of HACCP to the actual production work, particularly with regard to the possibility of improving (in the sense of decreasing) the cost price of the manufactured product. Indeed, the HACCP, as recalled above, is interested in the control of the risks on the product to sell locally or in the cross-border trade. HACCP does not favor one manufacturing process over another. In other words, by comparing several manufacturing processes of a desired product, a properly trained engineer can select the process that justifies the best management of the health risks of the product and, at the same time, can make it as cheaply as possible. This type of comparison is not as difficult to make as most of the industrial food processing methods are in the public domain and accessible today through organizations such as Codex, Universities, and Institutes etc. This work of democratization of the industrial principles was largely facilitated when the American State, at the end of the seventies of the last century, put at the disposal of the private sectors processes of food production used by the US army during the World War II. Even today, many companies from different countries are using the techniques in question for the industrial transformation of consumer products.
It is difficult to say whether our Moroccan operators are benefiting from this wave of democratization of industrial principles in agribusiness. But, opportunities that our operators miss are identifiable. As an example, the case of table olives of which Morocco is a major producer of international dimension. The black olives (raw material) are washed, then dried for a few hours in an oven at 60 ° C. Afterwards, they are coated with a thin film of olive oil before being packaged under vacuum for the attention of the end consumer. This process, which is used by European operators, adds little on the cost price of the Finished Product. EU operators, as wise “middlemen”, buy olives from us, prepare them as indicated and sell them better than us to markets all over the world. The black olives of Moroccan operators, frequently heat treated (autoclaved) for export, simply cannot stand the competition, for being more expensive and to have lost much of their organoleptic interest. And how many equivalent cases of this example can be observed elsewhere in Africa?
With the goodwill of our decision-makers, the Acfta, coupled with widespread promotion of the use of HACCP, can make our continent, rich in resources and water, self-sufficient in just a few years. Of course, the self–sufficiency remains a prerequisite for the stabilization of the African population whose youth can then meet the challenge of improving the quality of life on the continent. The AEFS (Association of African Experts in Food Safety) is ready to be part of this positive logic by making our contribution where it is needed to boost the international development of our agri-food sectors.
*: Recently, this Repository was renamed HARPC (Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls) in the FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act). The health risk management approach remains the same for both systems.
