Non classé

The obstacles to the New Development Model

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

His Majesty King Mohammed VI called for the establishment of a New Development Model (NDM) that is in line with the real capabilities of the Kingdom and can benefit the entire Moroccan people. In the same vein, we understand that the signing ceremony – of the structuring project for the manufacture of Covid-19 and other vaccines in Morocco – which King Mohammed VI chaired on July 5 at the royal palace in Fez, participates in same will of our King to raise Morocco’s position to the rank of leader in, among others, the agri-food fields, which we will discuss below, and pharmaceuticals on which we will seize the opportunity to come back to it at another time.

The commission responsible for developing the NDM project, which has completed its work and handed over its informed study to the sovereign, is now addressing, at the King’s request, the components of the nation’s vital forces across the country to explain to them the important lines of this major new project and, at the same time, note their opinions and comments which will be taken into consideration in the subsequent definition of the human, material and regulatory conditions for the implementation of the NDM. The national press, in turn, widely spoke about the subject of the NDM and the commission, known as the “Benmoussa commission“, which leads this project.

For this blog, we are particularly interested in the improvement that the NDM could bring to the activity of the agri-food sector to take our services to a higher level and thus serve as an example to other countries in our region. In this context, we must admit that the system currently in force – and the prescriptions which underpin it for different areas of the economic activity of our country – must have been considered obsolete, or that they have reached their limits for Morocco to decide replacing them. The NDM must therefore, for what interests this article, allow national operators of the agri-food sector to produce and market articles with “Quality / Price” ratios as efficient as possible to support our competitive objectives on international markets; where the competition is fiercer day by day. However, the quality of food products, which we are talking about, is measured with codified regulatory methods, which appear in Law 28-07 and for which the HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) represents the framework of choice. Under these conditions, the announcement of the imminent change in the current development model allows us to conclude that, alongside other identified regulatory shortcomings, the law in force which regulates the quality of food products must, in turn, have been considered as requiring a “facelift”. However, the food safety law 28-07 in question, based on HACCP and promulgated just ten years ago, does not appear to have aged to this point. Its careful reading, and that of the texts adopted for its application, show that the regulations they contain are fully in line with, in particular, consumer protection as provided for by the Codex Alimentarius and other reference regulations.

Yet, on closer inspection one realizes, although Law 28-07 is clear in its wording and spirit, that the officials of ONSSA (National Office for Sanitary Safety of Food Products), which is exclusively responsible for implementing this regulation, apply it in a way discretionary and largely distorted. For example, the law provides that companies recall, or withdraw, their products recognized as non-compliant. I have no recollection, as a regular observer of what is happening in the food sector, of a meritorious actions of ONSSA on this subject. This fact absolutely does not allow us to extrapolate that everything manufactured in our Agrifood Sector Units would be perfect. This would offend scientific common sense, and furthermore, such a claim would run counter to objective observations in the many countries concerned with sound law enforcement.

That being said, the relevance of the law, notwithstanding the quality of the regulatory texts which compose it, depends on the way in which it is put into practice by those in charge of it. With regard to the application of Law 28-07 and the texts taken for its execution, the ONSSA, an organization closely subordinate to the Ministry of Agriculture, leaves, our records being authentic, an impression of deep lethargy. It is as if the officers of this body are there just to deal with the day-to-day business. One example, among many others, is although the law requires these inspectors to put in writing any deviations and other breaches of the law that they may observe in the companies and establishments visited during their inspections – to date and co-sign the observations made with the hierarchy of the inspected company – these employees do nothing. In common parlance this is called “Resisting law enforcement” which normally leads to disciplinary action or referral to court.

As can be assumed, these officials would not disregard the law they oversee if they knew they would be held accountable for the way they are acting.

The Europeans, with whom we have an association agreement, apply their regulations better. This allows them to trade in food and other commodities with countries all over the world. But this is not the case for Morocco, where more than ¾ of our exports enter the EU market through a very small number of countries. Morocco being a sovereign country, why then our foreign trade is so dependent on a tiny fraction of the world population; where some of them tell whoever wants to hear them that they can very well do without importing our foodstuffs.

Although this anomaly (excessive subordination to a particular market) of our foreign trade does not seem to have an intelligible explanation in the explicit agreements that bind us to the EU, there must be a reason for our bondage to a single market. The answer would therefore to be found elsewhere than in the formal texts which regulate our exchanges with Europe. However, in this case, what is not duly recorded often lends itself to hidden arrangements. In this regard, one can conjecture that a propaganda that continues over decades – which praises the alleged superiority (to be demonstrated) of EU standards, combined with targeted protocols for the accreditation of official Moroccan bodies managed by officials who fully agree to EU proselytism, all complemented by incentives for targeted individuals for training on EU standards in Europe, “generously offered” and / or the delivery of foreign decorations and / or travel visa facilitation and others – would have finished shaping the minds of some of our high officials  and obtained their full adherence to EU paradigm.

The icing on the cake (for these people), this attitude of blind submission, so to speak, of some of our officials to the EU theses combines well with the windfall economy that EU wants to perpetuate in our country, via this category of individuals, to maintain  the exploitation of our wealth by European potentates.

Now, if it is a self-evident truth to say that it is the EU countries that benefit greatly from the trade agreement with Morocco; It is equally obvious that a change, albeit a legitimate one, in Morocco’s course, which would orient our trade differently from what it is today, will undoubtedly provoke an outcry at the level of EU decision-makers and of their Moroccan representatives. The resistances mentioned above will certainly multiply in the agri-food sector and elsewhere.

In this regard, the Der Spiegel relates, in its last issue of the 21st current, in an article devoted to the Covid-19 pandemic that: “Germany is often good in management and bad in creation“. This is in line with what we indicated in a previous article (see here ). In this regard, Morocco can rightly claim to have designed, prepared and conducted a vaccination campaign, and also managing its side effects, in a masterly way that continues to inspire other countries in the world.

Also, some of our officials from the Ministry of Health would do well to reflect on the fact that it is not because a pharmacopoeia, or another reference document, is written in French that it is automatically better than another written in English or in Chinese or other (see here).

Taking into account the above reasoning, and to better guarantee the success of the NDM, it seems that Morocco must take as soon as possible into account, in particular, the legitimate concerns of certain exporters to whom the implementation of the NMD can make them lose opportunities in traditional markets and provide assistance and support for them to access existing alternative markets. At the same time, it is necessary, in our opinion, to reflect on the problematic posed by those among our decision-makers in the upper sphere of the public service, and perhaps elsewhere, who show a greater inclination to the causes of foreign countries than to those of their own country. Our suggestion would be, at a minimum, to reorient the careers of these people to prevent the possibility that they could represent an additional obstacle to the implementation of the NDM to which His Majesty King Mohammed VI called and which our country badly needs.

Africa/Expertise/News

The Iberian component of German ambition

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

In recent days, everyone, locally and internationally, has been able to realize how seriously diplomatic relations between Morocco and Spain have deteriorated. The reasons for this deterioration are above all political in nature. This is an area that is not the traditional focus of this blog. This being the case, the affirmation of our Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation and Moroccans living abroad, Mr. Nasser Bourita, that “Spain must understand that today’s Morocco is not comparable to the Morocco of yesterday ”perhaps calls for another, namely that the Spain of today is no longer the Spain of yesterday.

But, while the Kingdom of Morocco has become fully aware of its enormous potential and its particularly privileged geostrategic position, Spain, which was independent in its decisions and Master of its destiny, is in the process of taking the measure of this which it risks losing by clinging with all its might to an adrift EU led by a “German locomotive” which is running out of steam every day “in full view of all“. In this sense, while the other EU countries have shown, by their silence, their disapproval of the Spanish initiative to receive on its territory a sinister torturer (Brahim Ghali), under a false name (Mohamed Ben Battouche) and which, in addition, is claimed by their own judicial system, Germany, the first to seek the crisis with Morocco, was the only one, according to the Spanish media, to show solidarity with the Iberian country in this action of a terrorist nature.

We have to go back a little to understand the origin of this reciprocal infatuation that the Germans and the Spaniards have for each other and the solidarity that results from it even in the face of acts that border on Mafia methods.

For us Moroccans from the north of the country (occupied by Spain for a few decades), our school authorities used, after the withdrawal of Spain, to systematically impose Spanish as our second foreign language after the French. This was the case when I joined the Lycée Moulay Youssef in Rabat as an internal student in 1967. The following year, we were a few dozen deserving Hispanic students, from all over Morocco, to benefit from a trip offered by the Spanish Embassy in Rabat. We had then visited, in ten days, the cities and regions of Seville, Cordoba and Granada.

My account of that trip having been awarded, I repeated the school excursion the following year, this time to Madrid and region. We were staying in a convent in Carabanchel.

With a few comrades from northern Morocco, we saw no difference between the way of life of the Spaniards, Andalusia in particular, and that of our region of Ouazzane and Chefchaouen. Outside the cities, many Spanish peasants still traveled on donkeys or mules, and their somewhat frugal Mediterranean diet greatly resembled ours. In Granada, many gypsies still lived like troglodytes.

At the time, travel from Morocco to Spain was accessible to everyone, which exerted great migratory pressure on the southern border of France and, consequently, on the Franco-German border.

It should be remembered at this level that we were not very far from the end of the Second Great War, during which a large number of Europeans suffered from hunger and malnutrition. This bad memory had prompted European officials at that time to initiate prospective studies in the sixties to develop policies that would prevent the populations of European countries from reliving new periods of hunger and undernourishment. The studies in question showed a large divergence between the demographic progression curves and those of growth of food resources to cope with the new mouths to feed. This type of divergence seemed much more marked in our African countries. As a result, it became easy to deduce that it was only a matter of time before famine emigration from Africa, a legacy of European colonialism, would invade the European continent. Given the evidence at that time, Spain appeared to be the weak link in the European ambition, of German origin, to arm itself against African economic emigration. Germany, which seems never to have digested its debasing defeat of the 1940s to the allies led by the United States, and which had, very probably, sworn to itself to take its revenge on the economic level, would have seen there was an opportunity to materialize his dream of a triumphant return to the plan in question. It then, supposedly, used all its influence and prerogatives as a donor to other EU countries (see here) to integrate Spain to the EU. At first, Spain was offered, in short, a jump seat.

In this respect, Spain’s exports to the rest of the EU, food in particular, were systematically checked for lack of confidence in the work of the Iberian country.

But, as the Spaniards became familiar with EU cogs, they developed more ingenuity and intrigue. These skills enabled them to bring the EU project, known since under the designation of “Dijon blackcurrant principle” to a successful conclusion. This agreement established, in the absence of Community harmonization, the principle of “mutual recognition by the Member States of the European Union of their respective regulations“. Spain could then export its products with less hindrance to other EU countries.

By defending Spain’s entry into the EU, and then consolidating the Iberian position within the EU market, Germany has done a double blow. It made it possible to considerably slow down the previous African emigration through Spain and, at the same time, contributed to transform the Iberian country into a vast project of investments by Germany and others in all fields, highways, real estate , automobile construction, hotel industry, chemistry / parachemistry and so on. Best of all, the markets of South American countries, linguistically close to Spain, have also become much more accessible to German operators through their Spanish branches.

Incidentally, having, as a legal expert, handled in one capacity or another many cases between Moroccan and Iberian operators, the Catalan region sometimes gave me the impression of a large center of subcontractors for German firms.

In summary, German investments, which drained more investments from other EU countries, totally transformed the Kingdom of Spain, which from the mid-seventies, with great speed, went from a country with Third World characteristics to a modern country that aspires to overtake France. At the same time, having “imported” an economy largely subsidiary to the German economy, the level of activity of the Spanish economy has become heavily dependent on the health of the German economy. Using a metaphor, you could say that ” if Germany coughs, Spain catches a cold“. And that, in our opinion, undermines the independence of the judgment of Spain that we knew from before.

This kind of intimate business relationship, initially desired by the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) for the benefit of its companies, brought the two countries together, which have since been rendering each other a mutual service as we have just seen in the conflict which actually opposes Morocco on one side, Germany and Spain on the other.

The point is that the products that come to us from Germany and Spain can be found everywhere else and at cheaper prices. Then, contrary to what Europe suggests, many among the countries of the EU are far from being self-sufficient in terms of food, something that matters most in these troubled times as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown brilliantly.

As far as we are concerned, Morocco has one of the highest agrifood potential in the world. Suffice to say that these countries, Germany, Spain and others need us, as Moroccans and Africans, much more than we need their services.

But we live in a globalized world and therefore have to sell what we produce in order to live. So, in the face of foreseeable EU trade restriction measures, and while waiting for the effective launch of the Acfta (African Continental Free Trade Area) to boost our trade with our African brother countries and friends, there is always, for operators who may be interested, the US market which is buyer of everything we can produce and sell, and at prices much more attractive than those offered by EU countries.

Africa/News

The decline of German prestige

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

The town of Ouazzane, where I grew up, is known in Morocco for its Koranic traditions and its crafts, of which weaving and tannery are the most representative. But in our childhood, after Morocco’s independence, we were, as kids, more interested in jobs that gave us something to have fun with. The spinning top was one of our favorite toys. The artisans who made them did not know about unemployment. These fabricators carried out their manufacturing operations, almost identically, using only their memory and rudimentary working tools.

History shows that the stages of artisanal manufacturing are phases through which countries pass in their transit towards more progress. But few countries have been able to promote artisanal trades through industrialization as the Germans have done. The reason is that the Germanic apprenticeship system, unique in its kind, has for centuries provided for the alternation, for the candidates in training, of a school education coupled with an apprenticeship with a “Master of apprenticeship“. In other words, if there is no place with the apprentice master, there can be no training of an apprentice who will then become a technician or even a specialist. It is the widespread application of this practice that has long promoted “Made in Germany” industrial products. This system is also found in countries of Germanic obedience such as Switzerland.

Thus, Germany had the chance to have the foundations to build on it a model of civilian development that could have set a benchmark for countries around the world. Unfortunately, the onset of the First World War and, above all, the Treaty of Versailles which followed, in our opinion, completely upset this prospect for the Germans.

Indeed, the treaty in question included financial requirements, reparations for war damage to France in the first place, but also to Great Britain, which will subsequently prove to be beyond the possibilities of reimbursement of defeated Germany. This remark is probably one of the factors that led the US Senate at the time to refuse to ratify this Treaty. The impossibility of repayment and the resentment of the Germans, as a result, constituted the seeds of the emergence of Nazism which led to the Second Great War.

During this war, Denmark, a small neighbor to the north, was among the first countries to be invaded in 1940 by the Germans. In this connection, it is reported that after a firefight incident between German soldiers and the Danish Royal Guard, a Colonel came out of the palace to inquire into the situation. Stirring a little heap on the ground with his cane, he asked one of his soldiers, “What is this?”. The soldier replied, “The brain of a German soldier, Colonel.” The Colonel concludes: “This is why they are so aggressive; they have such a small brain”.

This joke, macabre as it is, refers to a dichotomy that some observers have noticed among the Germans. On the one hand, they can efficiently manufacture complex machines. But, they sometimes seem to lack consistency when it comes to measuring the impact of their actions, or their words, on others. For example, they strive to make a clear separation between “Nazis” and “Germans”. Since there is no biological basis for such an assertion, one can only surmises that, for example, the money that the Germans pay to victims of Nazism would ultimately make people forget the horrors of the Holocaust. But, that would ignore an important detail. The Nazis are indeed fanatics of a particularly virulent strain; but they did not descend from another planet on earth. They are Germans too. I remember during a student discussion in the 1970s the startling statement of a German scholar who said: “If Hitler had won, I would be the governor of Lausanne now“.

The point is, Germany lost the war, and without the muscular financial and administrative intervention of the Americans, the Germans would have had no chance of becoming what they are today. After taking up residence there, the American delegates, like pragmatic people, encouraged the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to get involved in what the Germans did best, namely the machine tool industry. This equipment was exported all over the world with the US market as its first destination. US initiatives, along with their money and that of their Middle Eastern partners, have boosted the German economy, which quickly transformed to establish itself as Europe’s leading economic power. As a corollary, German industrial power has, in short, swept aside any hint of competition from other EU member countries. The regained Germanic economic power, supplemented by their sales force, has thus widened the deficit of the EU partners vis-à-vis the Germans. Most of the countries in the EU market then became debtors of Germany, which gave the Germans a unique lever to guide the EU’s financial, economic, industrial and agricultural policy as they saw fit. At the same time, this German metamorphosis must probably have acted like a drug on the minds of the Germans who began, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to gradually distance themselves from their US mentor.

Seeing this, and once the Americans documented this behavior over a reasonable period of time, they, in turn, began to undo “the crowns they had previously plaited to FRG“. Some observers, including ourselves, believe that the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank long considered the gateway for German businessmen to the US market, and the Volkswagen scandal, also known as “dieselgate” , events initiated in the USA, are part of a set of acts decided by the Americans to punish the Germans for their behavior which has become hostile to the interests of Uncle Sam.

Further actions followed which hardened the entry of “Made in Germany” products into the US market. The Germans were supposedly touched in their pride and then turned to the Chinese market as an alternative. But, after a few years, German businessmen realized that this Asian market was locked from within and much more difficult to control than the US market.

However, the German economy is addicted to exports. For this reason, Germany seems to have no other solution than to reclaim the markets of our African continent. Considering the European rules in force, they must carry out their procedures through the EU, whose cogs they have perfectly mastered, as we have just said.

In this regard, to come to their end, EU strategists have in the past used to show their teeth to bend their counterparts in a negotiation. This is how they approached the negotiations with Morocco in the nineties by Mr. Franz Fischler, then European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development. They have of course succeeded in forcing us into what they pompously called an Association Agreement and which we believe needs to be reclassified as an agreement for our enslavement!

But, this type of worn-out trick (showing fangs) no longer works with our African countries. First, as it has served enough, it became obsolete. Secondly, because the markets of our Continent are coveted by everyone and, henceforth, the preference will necessarily go to the best price which has often not been the case for EU companies. Finally, perhaps we Africans understand a little better every day that the German Prestige, which EU officials put forward to conduct their Business with others, no longer deceives anyone. It is at best a largely overrated reputation or, more simply, a facade slogan behind which hides the European desire, constant for centuries, to maintain their control over our raw materials in particular and our wealth in general.

However, only the effective entry into force of the Acfta (African Continental Free Trade Area) will show these people that we are better placed to manage our African affairs on our own.

Expertise/News

The withering of EU

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

In the seventies of the last century, there was no lack of work in Switzerland in general and in Lausanne in particular. As students, we took great advantage of these opportunities to help, for example, pay our relatively expensive university fees at the time. In this context, I successively replaced on July / August, during their annual leave, two technicians from the CHUV (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois), Messrs Rochat and Falci, at the Nestlé Hospital. The job was to take electrocardiograms (ECGs) and then hand them over to the appropriate doctors. These records were mandatory for any new patient who arrived at the hospital entrance service and, moreover, at the request of one or another department that makes up the hospital. On average, about 50 of these recordings per day were made on the mobile device in question. The work itself is not complicated. But, smearing electrolyte solutions and attaching suction cups to the firm breasts of young women to get a good ECG trace was, for a beginner like I, a recurring moment of truth in these recording operations.

One day, I was called in to do an ECG in the emergency room on an elderly patient whom staff had identified as an aristocrat of Iranian descent. The lady, in distress, was lucid but we felt in her a feeling of deep sadness as she was seeing herself largely naked, connected to monitors and surrounded by a staff for the needs of auscultations, blood samples and other diagnostics. At a certain point, this thought escaped her: “you know; I was very beautiful when I was young and the men turned around in my path”. There was pain in her voice, understandable pain, but the important thing for the medical staff at the time was to prolong her life. She was released after that, recovered, a few weeks after her admission.

In the period of the Covid-19 pandemic that we are currently experiencing, the story of this lady’s withered beauty can easily be compared to the image emanating from the unenviable situation that EU countries are experiencing at these times. Indeed, if there is no doubt about the past glory of many of these countries, more or less disparate but all clinging to the sacrosanct common market as a lifeline, there is no longer any doubt that, like this old aristocrat withered by time, members of the UE  are currently going through times that are anything but glorious. So think about the fact that Great Britain refused after Brexit to grant full ambassadorial status to the EU representative in London, or the recent expulsion by Russia of three European ambassadors during the very visit to Moscow from Haut representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Mr. Josep Borrell. The expulsion was even embellished with a comment that Russia was ready to sever trade relations with the EU. There is also the reaffirmed position of the pharmaceutical industry to supply vaccine to many countries before those in the EU, which do not produce vaccine on their own, because they pay better than the European Commission. This position of seeing the EU as a lesser clientele has also been held by President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Tired of the French comments on the alleged high price of Brazilian soybeans, Mr. Bolsonaro advised French President Emmanuel Macron to buy “European soy” instead.

Globally, and as reported in posts before in this blog, EU countries have been experiencing one snub after another in recent years. The result is that the EU has a largely negative trade balance elsewhere in the world but in surplus with our African countries. However, this deficit of the countries of our continent with the EU is bound to be reduced, then to be reversed, as the Acfta (African Continental Free Trade Area) takes place. Despite this, we Africans are very tolerant. We obviously do not forget that, among other things, our former European colonizers traded in our ancestors as like animals and used our resources and our women at will without the slightest contrition yesterday or today. But, it would suffice that they show themselves a little more human by recognizing their responsibility for having committed the crimes that African countries and others accuse them of so to definitively turn this black page in their history and start another page of collaboration with our African countries. In fact, it is even in their interest because, to take the example above of the old aristocrat, the “equivalent medical staff”, to that indicated in the example above, which would prevent the UE from slipping into hell, can be neither America nor Asia which no longer find, according to our long observations, great interest in perpetuating their exchanges with the EU according to the current mode. Indeed, if the EU common market for the free movement of people and goods has shown signs of irreversible slowing down lately, experts also note that the Euro, another cement of EU countries and their favorite means payment, was built on inappropriate structures from the start. In short, the fact of maintaining at all costs the Euro outside the accepted rules for the support of a currency only increases the cataclysm which will inevitably end up occurring with disastrous repercussions including on Germany, considered until now as the industrial jewel of the EU.

However, the Europeans, who keep knocking on the door of the AU (African Union) to push us to formalize with them a new agreement for our exchanges, know more than anyone that we represent in a way the remedy they wish for their recovery. A continent rich in mining, fishery and agricultural resources, with more than 50 percent of the planet’s arable land fallow, has the potential to meet its needs and greatly help those of its neighbors for their immediate or future need. At the moment, the AU is in “wait and see” mode. But as a prerequisite, the EU must abandon what Mr. Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda, called in a mid-February interview with Der Spiegel “the arrogant attitude of the Europeans”. In this sense, the EU countries must change their behavior quickly enough because, starting with Morocco and going further in Africa, we too will soon no longer need the services of Europeans for our trade and our prosperity.

In this regard, after Morocco’s official independence from the visible tutelage of France, many Moroccans of the Jewish faith (hereafter the Great National Elite) chose to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere. Considering the information gleaned over the last 35 years of our expertise work in Casablanca, first as a senior official of a Moroccan pharmaceutical group, then as a legal expert for the agro-industrial sector and, moreover, given my numerous exchanges with my late friend, Mr. Paul Pinhas Abergel (may God have his soul), kingpin of the Casablanca component of the Great National Elite; the plausible explanation, in our opinion, for this emigration of about sixty years ago is probably due to the fact that the Moroccan Great National Elite very probably understood before us that, in terms of Morocco’s independence, France had simply “retreated to jump better ”. In other words, the colonizer would have brought out his soldiers and put in place in a well-studied scheme other civilian officials, accompanied, in a more or less elaborate manner, by his bodies on the spot including the CFCIM (French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Morocco). It is useful to point out at this level that the CFCIM includes several hundreds of employees, which is indicative of the importance that the metropolis attaches to its Casablanca agency. But, in this new master plan to establish Parisian neocolonial prerogatives on our economy, there was no room for Moroccan citizens who want to help their country as is the aspiration of members of the Moroccan Great National Elite; which prompted them to withdraw temporarily (to expatriate themselves) while waiting for better times to intervene.

Today, that moment has come and our sovereign, King Mohammed VI, could not be clearer on the will of the Kingdom of Morocco to move towards a new model of development to allow us to recover our sovereignty over the set of essential economic activities of our country. Among these activities, there is the agro-industrial sector. In this regard, the Israeli expertise, recognized by everyone, is indisputable. Under these conditions, the engineers and other professionals of the Great Moroccan National Elite, who are now also part of the Israeli genius, are every day more numerous to show their will to return to their country of origin to answer the call of our sovereign to restore the Kingdom to its rightful place in the concert of nations. At the same time, it will serve as an example to other brotherly countries and friends in Africa and the Middle East.

We are pleased to remind you here that Israeli professionals, a good proportion of who are members of the Great Moroccan National Elite, provided great support to Europeans more than fifty years ago by making good food accessible, including chicken and turkey fillet, to low income members of the EU population. Even that the products of this good food were obtained on a largely arid land and far from the fertility and the water resources which benefit European agriculture (see here).

So, insofar as the growing impoverishment of the EU population is now a reality that no longer suffers from doubt, and knowing that the fishing, agricultural and other mineral resources of Morocco constitute a cumulative potential which places it among the top ten countries on the planet, it is more than certain that the EU countries, our immediate neighbors, would have every chance, if they so wish, to benefit from the Africa which is emerging with the advancement of establishment of the Acfta. The Moroccan Grand National Elite, which helped improve the food purchasing power of the European needy class half a century ago from Israel, will be ready, in the months and years to come, to start this operation all over again from the Kingdom of Morocco, their country of origin.

In this perspective, the contribution of the African diaspora, which precisely includes our Moroccan fellow citizens established in Israel and elsewhere, will be ready to help prevent the “EU Empire” of the devastating effects of the complications of withering which now heavily impact EU countries in full view.

Africa/News

What post-Covid Africa / EU relationship?

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

In the mid-seventies of the last century, the Director General of Nestlé at the time gave a press conference in Bern (Switzerland), which I attended, to answer questions from NGOs relating to powder milk (for babies) marketed in Africa. He first indicated how proud he was to have started his job as an apprentice at the bottom of the Swiss multinational before rising through the ranks to become its top manager. Since that time, at Nestlé as elsewhere, the big decision-makers at the top of the big groups have almost exclusively been recruited from among financiers, sometimes without any intrinsic knowledge of the industrial activity they were called upon to manage. And these new types of leaders continue to have in common the motto of profit at all costs, for shareholders first, even if the number of employees has to be downsized at will to meet this goal. In short, this marked the starting point of the financialization of society which today affects a large part of global companies, particularly those of our European neighbors, who are also our ex-colonizers *.

*: We understand by colonizer in this article, one or the other of the European countries which colonized African countries. For us in Morocco and West Africa, it is mainly the French state.

The “magma of profit at all costs” now bathes, in a more or less pronounced way, the main part of the activities of the private sectors all over the world and, for certain countries on the north side of the Mediterranean, as the crisis of Covid-19 has just revealed, “the motto of easy and immediate gain” is about to engulf them in an existential crisis from which they will probably take a long time to recover. It is true that the one who seeks profit and only profit ends up acquiring an opportunist and mercantile spirit which consists in investing the minimum possible in order to quickly reap the maximum that he can. In this regard, in the eighties of the past century, while working as a manager in a pharmaceutical group in Casablanca, I was able to observe that orders for medicinal active principles, worded in accordance with pharmacopoeias of large European countries, were supplied from China directly to Morocco, sometimes without even passing by the country in whose name the certification was granted. The occasional verification of the initial selling price and the one invoiced to us by the European Broker showed substantial margins for the latter. This mercantilism which consists in the redistribution of the “made in china”, or of another country outside Europe, by tinkering it to make it appear as “made in EU”, supposedly “above all suspicion”, must have turned out to be extremely juicy, quick, easy and risk-free, to the point that EU countries no longer saw any (financial) interest in producing anything at home.

As a result, with the outbreak of Covid-19, several EU countries no longer knew how to make a face mask, or an artificial respirator or any other material that could have helped slow the pandemic. In addition, the sudden slowdown in international trade has also highlighted the EU’s dependence on a number of medicines, previously supplied from China, which suddenly became rare or not found in European pharmacies, such as paracetamol for example. European countries then began to reiterate in unison their desire to regain their manufacturing sovereignty over many products in order to face potential future crises. In other words, the EU seemed to rediscover, on the occasion of this pandemic, the virtues of the real economy and to measure the extent of the misery of de-industrialization to which a mercantilist financialization of their economy has led them with the aim of rapid gain by speculation.

It is useful to remember that these colossal financial gains, which are they real, which have benefited European societies, have been achieved mainly at the expense of our African companies.

But this backlash in the face of Europeans, generated by the EU’s lack of preparation for Covid-19, will not have displeased China, which finally sees the balance of serious and credible work tilted towards his favor.

In reality, it is not only the Chinese and their work that are belittled by the Europeans. We too, and our work in Africa, suffer the same type of denigration. So, on the eve of the launch of the AfCFTA (African Continental Free Trade Area) on January 1, 2021, it may be useful for us to draw inspiration from the Chinese approach, which has enabled China to enhance its credibility in the face of the EU, to guide us in achieving the same goal of credibility in turn.

What pleads in our favor is that we have our raw materials locally in Africa and their valuation is only a matter of will. The officials concerned of the AfCFTA are already looking into this chapter to find solutions to the questions that arise among which the rules of origin are in pole position.

Obviously, if we make food products, it is to eat them ourselves and sell them to others. But to export, it is necessary to respect sanitary and phytosanitary standards required by the Codex Alimentarius. This is where the shoe pinches, because while the EU puts its own standards ahead of Codex, the African continent as a whole has not produced its own standards to date. It is a thing of the past to consider the EU, our past colonizer, did everything to prevent us from achieving this goal. At the same time, we must recognize that we still depend on the accreditation of their private organizations which sometimes shamelessly overcharge our African companies before issuing them the necessary certificate. At the same time, this allows our ex-colonizers to know everything about our work and to control our entire business. It is not colonization by guns, but it is economic colonialism, devious and pernicious, which is far more complicated to get rid of.

But on closer inspection, perhaps it’s less complicated than it seems to regain our sovereignty over our economies, particularly in the agro-industrial sector which is the priority for us in Africa at the moment. Those responsible for advancing the work of AfCFTA will surely find a modus vivendi for cooperation on the basis of Codex and other international standards. But the issue of accreditation and / or certification of our private companies, so that they can fully exercise their production and export activities, will also have to find a solution.

In this regard, the concept of accreditation, or its corollary the certification, is based on two principles, Knowledge and Credibility. Today, knowledge about industrial food processing, with a few rare exceptions, is in the public domain and accessible to everyone. You just have to take a quick tour of the USFDA (US Food and Drug Administration) website, or the Codex Alimentarius to be convinced. On the other hand, credibility, that is to say the recognition of the sincere and regulatory side of an issued document (certification or other), is a quality that the signatory of such documents acquires through serious and solid work over the long run.

However, politicians at home in Morocco, some of whom have enriched themselves by being civil servants, or in the cash economy and / or speculation, like to paint a rosy picture of our industrial activities, foremost among which is the agro-industrial sector. In our opinion, the situation in Morocco, in particular, and probably in many other countries of our continent, is alarming in this regard. In the sense that if the private company, designed to make a profit, is likely to lend itself to possible abuses to make more money in defiance of the law, and that the certification of its work and / or its products can be justified in the eyes of regulatory bodies, it is on the other hand bizarre that official bodies (of the State) in our country, such as ONSSA (National Food Safety Office) or LOARC (Official Laboratory of Chemical Analysis and Research) are certified by foreign  private certifiers. So, to show other African brother countries and friends the basics of working according to standards, we must first get rid of the minor status in credibility in which we have been locked up for over 60 years.

In addition, the EU certification bodies in question make the issuance of their certificates conditional on strict adherence to EU standards. However, these European standards, which deal with everything and its opposite, are neither set in stone nor incontestable. For example, the British want to abandon them from next January, the effective date of Great Britain’s exit from the EU (Brexit); to use their own standards, which nevertheless formed the basis on which the ISO standards were developed.

China for its part works according to USFDA standards, which are considered more reliable and objective. In this regard, if Europeans now recognize (half-heartedly) the reliability of raw materials sourced from China, they are still far from accepting the relevance of the Middle Kingdom in biological disciplines. Otherwise, they would have placed orders for the Chinese vaccine as they have done for others. But, they probably fear that such an act would validate de facto the considerable advance in the field of Chinese medical scientific research on the Europeans who will then have to content themselves with occupying a place at the back of their competitors.

The bitter reality is that the countries of the EU are less and less competitive, more and more speculators, whose commercial radius of the Euro is narrowing day by day and who find themselves today in a situation that we do not envy them. It is all of these reasons that must have prompted them to knock again on the door of the African Union (AU) to request what amounts to a second chance to cooperate with our continent, supposedly on new bases. The AU has not closed the door, but in a letter last Tuesday the Union postponed a possible meeting with the Europeans until next year. This time should probably be used to study on what criteria one must base oneself to conclude that people who remained for centuries in Africa and left behind only illiteracy and misery can be considered today as cured of greed and the speculative spirit that characterized the colonial era.

Africa/Expertise

Morocco, Hub of all desires

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

One of the recurring criticisms made to United States, repeated last Wednesday in the columns of the “China Daily”, written by international finance expert Dan Steinbock, is that “Unlike any other country, the US can print money at negligible cost and use it to purchase goods and services worldwide”. This type of analysis, mentioned from time to time since the creation in Brussels in 1973 of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), is supposedly one of the reasons behind the launch, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc, of the shared currency, the Euro, by continental Europe.

Until today, the ambition of the EU (hereinafter the Conglomerate) of a Euro that would move the Dollar has melted like snow in the sun.

Unlike Continental Europe, China, which is in an ascending phase of its economic and industrial power, does not seem to fear competition with the US; But the world’s second-largest economic power does not appear to have an immediate claim to replace the Dollar with their currency, the Renminbi.

It is useful to recall here that, since the dawn of time, before, during and after the Roman Empire, the Leadership, of a person or of a State, was rewarded by favors as a sign of recognition and gratitude in view of the leader‘s achievements. In this respect, France would have remained under German occupation for a long time, perhaps to this day, without the American intervention in 1944. Also, the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) would probably have had great difficulty in seeing the day, after the Second Great War, without the generous and massive aid and assistance of the Americans. Instead, there might have been a communist country in place, like the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), which would have had a destiny opposite to what characterizes current German prosperity.

The Germans know this, and indeed they were very grateful to the Americans that helped make post-war Germany the sacred monster of machine tool exports around the world. And US military and economic leadership over the liberal economy countries had been widely accepted by Europeans since World War II. It has even been strengthened with the formal adhesion of Western countries to the creation of SWIFT which initially propelled the Dollar to the forefront of international financial transactions.

Today, Germany, in complicity with France and others, is ostensibly showing their willingness to distance themselves from their traditional American mentor. Several interpretations are possible to explain this unprecedented turnaround in transatlantic relations, which will also impact us in Africa.

Among the hypothesis, there is one which wins our support more.

With the loss of their former colonies, the countries of Conglomerate EU, accustomed for centuries to harvest without embarrassment the fruit of the labor of others, but which cruelly lack Raw Materials in their reduced space, have become increasingly aware in being globally on the decline and that they were gradually losing ground in the race for international competition in all directions. Just think of their proven backwardness on “5G”, the electric car, information technology, artificial intelligence, the space race, and pandemic management and so on. And, indeed, the generalization of IT tools, including the Internet, which has made information available at the end of a click, has helped in bringing to light the tricks of the Conglomerate’s commercial and industrial optimization practices on the backs of Asian and American operators. In this way, many EU organisms derive from the practice of “copy and paste” on American organizations. For example, the creation of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was made on the basis of information and expertise largely provided by the USFDA (United States Food & Drug Administration). Also, the ECDC (European Center for Disease Prevention and Control) is directly inspired by the American CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

On the commercial level, there are numerous examples of products and / or articles manufactured in Asian countries, China in particular, then repackaged and labeled as of European origin before being shipped for distribution in Africa (our archives).

By favoring the recourse to this type of speculative practices which generate easy and rapid gains, the EU Conglomerate has become, in short, a major hub of commercial optimization (mercantilism).

It is therefore possible to think that beyond the recommendations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the severe restrictions, currently imposed in parallel by the US and China on the arrival of continental Europeans in their countries, may also be motivated by the desire to curb the unbridled enthusiasm of the EU Conglomerate to “copy and paste” the work of others.

These mentioned restrictions, among others, which would aim to drastically reduce the opportunities of the Conglomerate UE to divert the results of others to claim them as their own, in front of Africans and elsewhere, were probably more than enough to push Germany and allied to turning away from American Leadership.

As a consequence, European commercial and industrial weaknesses very quickly came to the surface to the point that the leaders of the various EU countries became very talkative about the industrial and commercial efforts to be made by the “countries of the old continent” to regain their sovereignties. These “sovereignties” indeed seem to have been seriously damaged on many levels by international competitors.

While Americans were the first to become aware of the widespread plagiarism of EU countries with regard to US know-how and, for years actually, have tried to limit ‘Copy / Paste’ attempts by reducing contacts of US officials with their European counterparts; It seems that the Chinese are also in the beginning of following this trend.

And, at the same time, Africans are learning by widening their eyes that, in contradiction to the claims supported by the Europeans, who qualify the “old continent” as the center of universal innovation, the EU countries seem to have little economic power except on the impression of the Euro.

The corollary of this observation is that the Conglomerate EU, whose trade is in deficit everywhere except with our African countries, needs more than ever to cling to its asymmetric trade with our continent, imposed on our countries originally by strength since the colonial era.

And the essential way to continue these exchanges, certainly after their rebalancing, is by road through Morocco.

Everything suggests that the Kingdom of Morocco, called to become the Hub of all desires, is well aware of this and has decided to accelerate the construction of an expressway linking Agadir to the Mauritanian border over more than 1,500 km.

But whether the EU likes it or not, they must now deal with a planetary competition for the privilege of doing business with Africa and, at the same time, realize that our continent is tired of playing the milking cow for them. From now on, they have to pay the right price to secure our cooperation.

On the same subject of asymmetric exchanges, and to putting an end to this habit of coming to us with sanitary standards aiming to serve the goals of the Conglomerate EU at the expense of our own interests, Morocco seems actually to favor collaboration with the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in implementing new standards, more objective, that the partners to the north of the Mediterranean shore will have to observe in the future or face legal action.

Morocco should continue on this momentum which will not fail to put balm in the heart of other brotherly African countries so that they in turn take their precautions and  ask for balanced exchanges in the future with the countries of EU.

Africa/Expertise/News

Covid-19 winners and the others

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

The Covid-19 has not finished making headlines. Recently, the media reported on a senior German official and whistleblower (suspended from his job after that), Mr. Stephen Kohn, who leaked to the press the report of a group of German scientists in which the latter denounce the Covid-19 pandemic as a “false global alert” and question the merits of the containment measures. The report says, among other things, that the number of deaths from Covid-19 would have been lower than that caused by the 2017/18 flu wave. And the report deduces that the Covid-19 pandemic would have been greatly overestimated.

Coming after the negative statements of President Trump on the lack of credibility of the WHO, and in the absence of a response from the UN body, the aforementioned report raises many questions about the WHO officials to defend the credibility of the institution and the merits of their management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In sum, as was the case with the appearance of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) in the early eighties of the past century, the debate between scientists on the different health aspects of Covid-19 will probably continue in the years to come with the hope of seeing a little clearer in it (see here)

But one thing is clear; the direct impact of HIV, virus of AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), did not give rise, at the time of its appearance forty years ago, to a notable disturbance in the economic and commercial sectors. By contrast, the Covid-19 has led in recent months to an upheaval, never observed before in peacetime, of all the working rules in most sectors of activity worldwide. The aviation industry has suffered the most serious crisis in its history. In the same vein, the transport of goods has been greatly disrupted following the closure by many countries of their borders. The first consequence of these disturbances, and other dysfunctions, was the reduction of work in tens of thousands of companies in the countries affected, sometimes their permanent closings, with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the tourism sectors, logistics and elsewhere. We must, of course, add to this disorder the terrible congestion of hundreds of hospitals because of a massive influx of patients in acute respiratory distress.

Some countries responded better to this unprecedented disaster than others. And the appropriate responses have not always been observed in so-called developed countries, as is usually the case in such circumstances. For example, Morocco, an African country, has received praise and has been cited as an example for its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic by many other so-called developed countries.

In fact, on closer inspection, it appears that our country has been preparing for quite some time already to face a disaster of this nature. Indeed, Morocco has become aware for years now that our development model, inherited from the protectorate and whose basic principles have been maintained until today, made us a society of docile and servile consumers, served mainly by a local elite fed largely by the hand of our “ex-protectors”. This elite, very minority but particularly active, takes, in a way, the defense of the doctrine of our ex-colonizers and militates for the maintenance with the former Metropolis first, and the EU countries then, of status quo in our very asymmetrical exchanges inherited from the time of colonization.

With this in mind, each time a problem arose, the aforementioned elite, including some of our senior public officials, turned to European countries to beg for a ready response. This often consisted of solutions tested elsewhere and, for the most part, did not correspond to our realities on the ground and therefore generally doomed to failure. This obviously does not prevent the assistance in question from being paid, in foreign currency and at a high price.

The result of all this is a kind of condemnation of Morocco, and this is supposedly the case for other African countries, to stay put instead of progressing. In addition, by agreeing to continuously sell off our Raw Materials in order to survive and import their finished products and services at high prices, we have witnessed, and contributed passively in a way, an increasing impoverishment of our populations.

Our sovereign, King Mohammed VI, who took the measure of this problem, ordered the elaboration (in progress) of a new development model where the Moroccans would take more their destiny in hand. Since then, there has been a national consensus that the development model that has framed Morocco’s activities so far damages our sovereignty and mainly benefits European prime contractors. In second place, the system also benefits their local support here that has developed an unhealthy dependence on Windfall economy.

So, at the time when the first signs of the pandemic appeared, the reflection on the implementation of an appropriate response, but Moroccan-Moroccan one, was well advanced which made it possible to produce and put on the market both masks as artificial respirators and other sanitary products “Made in Morocco” in record time. Some of these products continue to be exported to the world market.

On the other hand, the disruption of Covid-19 has confirmed that people’s travel and trade in goods have never been as intense as in the globalized world we live in today. In this regard, a number of recognized researchers believe that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will be felt in the many years to come. For example, Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the large-circulation Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and current president of the Asia-Pacific Initiative, believes that “At some point, the COVID-19 crisis will end. But as was the case with the first and second world wars, the end of the crisis will not mark a return to normal. Rather, it will signal the advent of a new normal. ”

Thus, in the same way that the rules put in place after the Second Great War (which still apply today) were very different from the rules in force before the Last Great War, the rules necessary to be put in place after the Covid-19 will be different from those currently in force. But the rules (in force) of today, in place for more than seven decades, are the very ones that favor the countries of the EU and keep us Africans in a state of subordinates. It therefore seems inconceivable that our neighbors in the north of the Mediterranean can accept without resistance the establishment of new post-covid-19 rules which would be in favor of us Africans. The struggle for this change is therefore only just beginning.

But Morocco is a country which claims loudly its Africanness, which has not finished rejoicing at being cited as an example of management of the Covid-19, while the Europeans, who have a lot of means, have shown all their contradictions and weaknesses in the management of this same pandemic. It follows that Morocco now inherits the duty to continue its efforts of “physical distanciation” from our European friends to establish its own African personality which can serve as an example to other brother and friendly countries of our continent.

In our opinion, the next step in this process should focus on efforts to implement standards specific to our African food sectors. In this regard, the excellent work previously done by China and India in the medicines sector can serve as an example. These two countries, in particular, have forced industrial lobbies in Western countries to limit the validity of the patents they have defined to their pharmaceutical products for trade. This victory enabled them, once the products in question fell into the public domain, to manufacture generics carrying their own brands which they promote commercially all over the world.

Regarding standards for international trade in agrifood products, falling under the global regulatory prerogatives of the Codex Alimentarius, Morocco, like other African countries which are members of the UN body, can use these Codex standards to adapt them to the specific rules of its internal market and the conditions of its consumer citizens. By pooling the efforts of our African countries in this direction, it will be possible to devise our own standards, formulated on the basis of those of Codex, which will have to be made available to future AfCFTA officials (African Continental Free Trade Area) whose start-up is planned for this month of July. This will provide them with a working tool to enable them to dialogue and negotiate serenely with other parts of the globalized world on behalf of the countries of our continent.

This will at the same time confirm the place that belongs to our African nations on the side of the winners of the Covid-19 pandemic. And that will allow us to teach those in need how to better manage epidemics that are bound to occur in the future.

Africa/Expertise/News

Good things can come from Covid-19

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

In recent times, books1, 2 have had the merit; in particular, of analyzing from a new angle the conditions in which African countries have gained their independence. The authors are interested in the events of colonial liberation after the Second World War and show, among other things, that for the colonial empires, after having formed indigenous elites according to their concept, they thought the time had come to hand over the reins of power to local officials to continue on the path that has been traced for them. But for African activists, on the contrary, independence was achieved by hard struggle. The fact is that, with regard to economic and commercial exchanges, the ex-colonial empires have never ceased to enjoy until today considerable privileges in the very biased exchanges which bind our African countries to our ex-European colonizers. And this same situation has hindered so far the possibility for our countries to develop economic and commercial exchanges elsewhere on the planet. Seen from this angle, the independence of African countries in the fifties and sixties of the past century seems to have been truncated.

On the same subject, if it is admitted that after the Second World War the world underwent profound changes – International relations and exchanges had for the first time to be based on the respect of the rules of new organizations like the IMF, the WTO, the Codex Alimentarius and others – this change did not alter the essence of the commercial and economic ties between the European colonial empires and their ex-African colonies. The rules in question, which allow very asymmetrical exchanges between our African countries and European countries, have been regularly adapted by the EU but only in the spirit of perpetuating the privileges stemming from the colonial era. The word of our leaders, if there was one, was then inaudible or largely ignored. All the same, it must be said that, apart from equity, the European colonizers had no reason to modify “cooperative relations” with submissive countries which served the very interests of colonial Europe extremely well. On the contrary, they wanted by all means to preserve these economic and commercial privileges originally acquired by force in the relations they have continued to impose on us since the colonial era. Second, the EU has systematically sabotaged by one means or another any effort to challenge the asymmetrical foundations of the trade it maintains with our countries.

To this end, an ad hoc political strategy has been put in place with the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) and the thousands of EU logorrheic standards as the salient elements of the system. This EU control on our wealth has been designed to withstand supposedly any hardship.

But, apparently, the appearance of the present pandemic (Covid-19), which is on the way to disrupt this entire ploy, was not part of the prudential analysis of the European governors.

First of all, since the appearance of the Covid-19 a few months ago, the whole world has observed that the usual rules of working of the European common market (free movement of goods and individuals), so much praised by the Gotha from the EU, are applied differently from country to country, or simply ignored. And the mismanagement is such that even the citizens of the member countries of the EU Bloc find it difficult to understand this disorder. More than that, African countries now seem, and this is a first, to do much better than the EU countries in terms of managing this pandemic crisis as well in terms of health (availability of masks and other sanitary equipment) or in terms of logistics and market supply (availability of sufficient food products at stable prices) or even in terms of purely security to enforce the state of emergency or public curfew. In this chapter, Morocco is commonly cited as an example to be followed by a number of French officials and European media. China, not the EU, has helped in this new perception.

On another side, according to the advice of the WHO and other reference organizations, the Covid-19 virus should be there for a long time. These organizations remind us that we must learn to “coexist” with this coronavirus not only because the presence of the pathogen will last for a long time, but also as preparation for our behavior to face other pandemics that will inevitably be part of our lifestyles in the future.

To overcome this type of scourge, the world needs successful experiences to take them as models to follow. In this respect, the European experience of management of the Covid-19, judged to be failing, does not come to anyone’s mind to constitute a model of success. Indeed, the number of deaths, compared to the size of the population, is the highest in the world as well as the number of infections and the number of hospital beds congested by the high rate of patients under stress respiratory. Conversely, the management of the pandemic by the Moroccan authorities has, by comparison, been much more effective. In short, Africa no longer needs to look elsewhere for the principles of efficiency, it has them within it.

That said, and considering the economic constraints, Europeans should in the near future lift the state of health emergency and containment. After which, many of them will likely want to return for their leisure stays with us that they love so much. If so, it will likely pose a health risk to residents in Morocco. Knowing that the realization of a vaccine against a virus, given the size of the molecule, is a complex process which takes a lot of time, in the case of SARS-Cov-2 (responsible for Covid-19) this will require in the best hypothesis months or years. Our officials in Morocco should then seriously consider subordinating the arrival of tourists from the Schengen Area to the production of a confirmed immune passport to protect us from possible additional infections.

Now if, according to this recipe, we are in a position to better guarantee the health security of Moroccans, limiting the arrival of Europeans in Morocco will have a negative impact on our export operations to these countries. We should therefore immediately think of alternatives to maintain our food export activities.

In this regard, as this Covid-19 pandemic has shown, food is more or less in short supply all over the world and we can help improve this shortage of supply. It’s true that nearby Europe, just on the other side of the Mediterranean is eager for our fresh vegetables and fruits which it buys from us at ridiculous prices. We must also realize that it will be more difficult for us to profitably market this type of fresh product in more distant markets in Asia and elsewhere. But if these vegetables and fruits were valued to make them commercially stable products, we could export them all over the world with much more profit. So, as the Moroccan state prepares to put its hand in the pocket to help the national companies to restart their productive activities, our competent authorities would be well advised to include among the eligibility criteria for the aid of the State the requirement for value-creation of fresh products right here in Morocco.

But let’s not forget that the absence of foreign visitors will also affect our tourism sector, the Hotel / Catering sector in particular. It may also be time to rethink the logic of working in this sector to bring in tourists from other regions of the world, America and Asia among others, who are less familiar with our country. One of the weaknesses, in our opinion, of the lack of attraction of our tourism sector to tourists outside of Europe is the lack of respect for the rules applied to this much globalized market. Indeed, tour operators (TOs) in North America and elsewhere have an aversion to reckless risk against which they cannot take out insurance to cover themselves in the event of contingencies. At the top of the list of risk elements to be controlled by insurance, there is the health hazard. However, insurance companies cannot accept to insure a TO in the absence of HACCP certification from the Hotel / Restaurant which will receive tourists. Our responsible officials should be aware that the development of Anglo-Saxon and Asian tourism is really dependent on the widespread implementation of health risk certification, the most prominent of which is HACCP certification.

In addition to HACCP certification and considering the current pandemic, it is now necessary to add additional certification against the risk of Covid- 19.

1) Robert Gildea. Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2019
2) Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? Edited by Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen

Africa/Expertise/News

Covid-19 is reshuffling trade practices

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

In the past, very hard, deadly and sometimes very long wars have been fought in the name of religions. The enemy warriors in those days were not afraid to die because, ones and the others, were convinced that places would await them in paradise.

It seems that this is no longer so much the case today because religions no longer have the same attraction for young people. Young people are now more concerned with protecting their lives and have endless possibilities for entertainment that can make their lives enjoyable. Second, because raising even one child today consumes a lot of time, energy and money, parents no longer accept the idea of foolishly losing their children in armed conflict.

In summary, whatever the cause or the slogan of promoting a soldier’s life today, a military career is of less and less interest to young audiences.

This being the case, it should be recalled that war has sometimes had virtues in ending barbaric regimes as was the case for Nazism for example. Because the human being adapts, and interests are created, including under the barbarian regimes. So, to bring about change for the better the war could appear, taking into account the sacrifices made, as a solution which brought a benefit in this type of situation. In fact, the adversary in the process of being defeated (Nazism or otherwise) had to choose between laying down his arms and making compromises to preserve what was left of his country or risk losing his life. In these circumstances, the choice is generally quickly made in favor of continuing to live. And to this end, the individual as well as the defeated country can make great concessions to make room for the necessary change.

In the same spirit, considering that lots of international organizations are currently inactive, prevented from doing so or having simply lapsed – like the WTO (See here), or the Codex Alimentarius whose rules are frequently ignored by EU countries and others, or even some Forums like the “G7” which continues to exist without a specific purpose can clearly distinguish it etc. -, the post-Great War world will never have needed so much change to restart on a newly defined basis. Perhaps the Covid-19 (whatever its origin) whose presence is felt by everyone at the moment, and with which the world population must contend from now on, can be a triggering factor for this change which has become imperative but which is slow to materialize.

In this context, relatively speaking, the confinement imposed by the “Coronavirus“, here in Morocco, elsewhere in Africa and in the world, seems to be widely accepted with the hope, in particular, of emerging unscathed from the pandemic for resuming a normal life. There are two main types of debate on the subject at the moment. Schematically, the first is of a sanitary and academic nature and seeks to understand how the virus (SARS-CoV-2; Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) appeared, spread and the risk it represents on different categories of individuals. People also want to understand the effectiveness of measures taken by one state or another to guard against danger and similar information on the same subject. On that purpose, the media bombard us daily with figures, data and countless circulating images. But hindsight is lacking at this moment to analyze all this and to distinguish in this profusion of information what is relevant from what it is not. It therefore seems that the media information on the health aspect of the pandemic must be received – pending the regulatory establishment of the protocols implemented which underlie the operations which generate this data – as being provisional elements which must first be left to settle before a correct analysis for any conclusion about them.

It will surely take a little time, months or even years, before a correct hindsight can allow us to conclude if the current virus will have been more or less virulent (in terms of death, suffering and other hazards) than others coronavirus before him, or even compared to a seasonal flu virus.

The second kind of debate relates to the impact of the pandemic on different sectors (economic, industrial, logistics, leisure, etc.) that sustain the working life of a country. Many of the problems that arise every day require immediate action to, for example, meet the supply of food, hygiene products, medicines and other necessities of life that cannot wait. In this respect, the pandemic seems to have an impact comparable to that of former armed conflicts. Thus, many Europeans, hard hit by this second aspect of the pandemic, compare what is happening to them now to the shortages experienced (recorded) during the Second World War. They refer, in particular, to the rationing of the food that was distributed to them bit by bit. It should be specified that, contrary to a broad misperception, many European countries are far from being self-sufficient, as we are in Morocco for example, in fresh vegetables and fruits which they must imperatively import to guarantee a balanced diet for their citizens. Perhaps this European awareness will help make “EU citizens” think in order to review their scale of values. Because having been used to an abundance of cheap food for decades thanks to the CAP system (Common Agricultural Policy) – intra-European overproduction aid which has proven harmful for us Africans – the question of the origin, the abundance or the low price of this food may never have been asked.

In other words, nobody informs them of the contributions, more or less forced, of our African countries and others, in this miracle of castle life that Europeans have long led at our expense.

In the immediate future, and pending repercussions that the Covid-19 will not fail, in our opinion, to impose for the redesign, among other things, of certain rules and / or circuits of international trade, the discussions are going well all over the world to understand how it all happened. These discussions seem to be the liveliest between member countries of EU. And among the reasons for the ongoing tensions underlying the acrimonious exchanges between European countries there is the fact that few people, including among the Europeans themselves, were in a position to suspect the mind-boggling state of the unpreparedness of EU against this type of disaster. Indeed, European countries which have been denigrating the quality of “made in China” products for years to discourage Africans from doing business with this country, find themselves forced to recant and to jostle at the gates of China, in competition with other countries which, as far as the USA is concerned, have more “cash” for the purchase of Chinese sanitary articles (masks, test kits, artificial respirators and others) to fight against Covid-19.

Note that during this period, the Chinese and other Asian countries concretely help (by material) our African countries, who thank them, to face the Covid-19 while some Europeans give us academic recommendations and suggest to guarantee our loan requests that would arise from the pandemic.

In addition, the extremely negative repercussions of the pandemic on most of the EU’s activity sectors ended up stressing all Europeans and putting in conflict the countries of southern Europe, weakened more by the Covid- 19, to German-speaking countries also affected but having relatively stronger financial backs. Italy and countries of support (Spain, France, Portugal, Greece and others) want Germany and its allies in this showdown (Holland, Austria, Denmark, Finland and others) to show more solidarity towards Latin countries, that is to say accept the principle of contributing financially to the benefit of southern European countries but at a loss as the American federal state would do (to which the EU compares itself all the time) to the benefit of its own states that would need it most. It is true that, in the collective memory of these countries in the south of the Alps, they remember that under the instigation of the Americans who liberated them 75 years ago – contrary to what happened during the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first world war when Germany was subjected to heavy economic repairs -, these countries of the European south were, at the end of the war, less attentive on the demands for German compensations for the damage which they were caused during the Second Great War. For this and other reasons, Italy now wishes to remind the Germans of this fact. Secondly, Italy and pals also suggest, which is true, that Germany is the country which has benefited from the common market and the Euro more than any other member of the EU and as such it would be right for the Germans to contribute a little out of their pocket for the cumulative losses that the Latin countries have suffered, on the European internal market, since the start of the adventure of the projects of the EU and the Euro.

Even more, although Italy and pals do not dare to say it directly, probably for fear of being accountable to their electorates, the countries sacrificed by German competition know perfectly well that the deterioration of their economies goes beyond the simple loss of competitiveness on EU market. They have also become uncompetitive in markets outside Europe such as the African and other markets. The reason stems from the fact that they compete in mid-range products (consumer products, small vehicles etc.) with countries like Turkey, China and others. But while the latter can manage to depreciate their currency and gain competitiveness, the countries of southern Europe no longer have the means to do so for the euro, a shared currency. And that’s where the shoe pinches.

These inter-European problems mentioned above, and others of the same kind regularly mentioned in the EU media as the recurring denigration by the Germans (often unjustified) of the quality of work in the countries of the south, reveal the depth of the malaise which is gnawing at the European Bloc from the inside. Especially now that everyone remembers the Volkswagen emissions scandal which revealed that the Germans are also high-end fraudsters. As a consequence, the EU project, of which Germany presides over its destiny with France for the task of “moderator”, built around a common market as a central pillar and the Euro as a corollary, all wrapped up in private standards ad hoc, has already started to fray with the departure of the British on the occasion of Brexit. Everyone now believes that the EU Block will continue to fall apart in the near future. It is becoming increasingly clear that Italy and others countries transalpine will gradually distance themselves, perhaps brutally, from other German-speaking countries.

But Europe has suffered more severely in several wars in the past and will be able to recover after the Covid-19 episode.

Now the question that interests this blog is what will happen to us in Africa.

In this regard, we Moroccans have noted with pride that our officials, encouraged by our sovereign, King Mohammed VI, have shown this time a great sagacity for an effective management of the Covid-19 pandemic what, according to EU media, even European countries now envy us. With this, our country is also animated by a great will to contribute to the economic and industrial take-off of other African brother and friendly countries. But as the proverb says: “Well-ordered charity begins with oneself“.

On this subject, although Morocco is well launched to meet the development challenge for itself, it will further convince its African peers of the relevance of its ambition as regional leader by showing, by exemplary and appropriate initiatives, that it knows how to improve work to make it more efficient, more fluid and make us more competitive internationally, particularly in the sectors that matter to Africa, foremost among which is the food industry. With us in Morocco, this sector is managed by law 28-07 of sanitary safety of Food products and placed in the name of the law under the supervision of ONSSA (National Office of Sanitary Safety of Food products). The law stipulates that food products intended for markets, local or export, must comply with the regulations regardless of their final commercial destination. But in reality, if ONSSA responds to the law concerning the surveillance of products on the local market, this body is outclassed by another administration, the EACCE (Autonomous Establishment of Control and Coordination of Exports), when it is to export these same products. While the law specifically names ONSSA as responsible for controlling food safety, the role of the EACCE seems to be redundant. But, in reality, the EACCE represents an anvil around necks of our exporters. Moroccan professionals in the sector know what to do with the export of agrifood products from Morocco in these times can be an obstacle course.

Until proven otherwise, this is not how you can earn leader stripes.

Second, African countries suffer from their dependence on the EU market, which is losing steam and becoming less and less profitable. They look to Morocco which has concluded a free trade agreement with the USA and seem to remind us that fifteen years after the signing of this precious agreement with the Americans, the time has come to energize it for the profit of our local operators before extending the benefit across our continent on the occasion of the upcoming launch of the Zleca (African Continental Free Trade Area). No need to remember that the US market represents the largest market in the world, that it is remunerative and accessing it has become much faster for our African agrifood products after the promulgation of the new health regulations of FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act).

In this vein, This note (article) is also to confirm to “whom it may concern” (in Morocco) that in a large part of the countries of our Continent, all of the AEFS experts (African Experts of Food Safety), a non-profit association that I have the honor of chairing, are ready to lend their support to contribute to the implementation of innovative solutions to streamline inter-African trade and, also, boost export agrifood from our countries to new destinations such as the US market or Asian on the basis of robust African expertise that meets the best standards in force around the world.

Non classé

The COVID-19 lesson for African trade

Posted on by Ahmed ESSADKI

The all-out crisis generated by the disease (or the fear of catching it) at Covid-19, (SARS-CoV-2; Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2), is now imposed everywhere, in the discussions of health professionals, politicians, economists and the general public when the latter can reunite. It is true that such meetings are becoming more and more exceptional in many countries of the planet because of confinements decided by the public authorities or else as individual initiatives to protect themselves against the spread of the virus.

Like other African countries, Morocco is also affected.

Now, the use of containment to fight against viral contamination is a recurrent attitude. While I was working (forty years ago) as an Assistant at the Institute of Experimental Pharmacology at the University of Lausanne, a former experienced practitioner, Dr Hans Salomon (God have his soul), reminded us each year to the approach of winter that  “catching a cold can last a few days if you caulk at home. But if you bombard him with drugs, he can settle down. “

Moreover, the warning signs (first symptoms) of Covid-19 largely overlap with those of a common cold in terms of sneezing, headache, fever, cough etc. It is therefore difficult, from the signs at this preliminary stage, to decide on the exact viral nature of the incubating disease and, therefore, the possible severity of its impact on the health of the person affected or the degree of its transmissibility to other people around you. Under these conditions, the authorities’ encouragement for individual / family containment derives from the fact that it is the act which presents the best “Benefit / Risk” ratio for the fight against the epidemic (pandemic). Because if, as is often the case, the infected individual (positive for the test), but in good health, takes the upper hand over the virus, he comes out of confinement by being immune which is good for him and for the community. But in the event that, on a small number (confined family), one of the (fragile) people grabs the Covid-19 and develops more alarming signs, there is always the possibility of transporting it to an appropriate care center (hospital, clinic etc.).

In this scenario of confinement in time, the advantage (if one can say) is that the risk of congestion in healthcare centers is remote, as shown by the observations in China where this type of confinement has been implemented early enough. Morocco has also opted for this early containment solution.

Conversely, letting the virus circulate without restriction among the population (or intervening with delay), counting on a massive and rapid (hypothetical) immunization of individuals, inevitably produces a high number of individuals in respiratory distress in a time interval reduced with the inevitable consequence of causing a bottleneck in the reception capacities of health centers, following the example of what happened in Italy.

That said, the Covid-19 crisis turned the world upside down far beyond the purely health aspect of the pandemic by burdening, in particular, the economic and industrial activities of many concerned countries by severely affecting transport and tourism.

For example, for considerations related to confinements imposed by the authorities, or else as individual or collective choices which stem from fear of the virus, the logistics activities of the affected European countries have been disorderly everywhere. Consequently, the supplies which depend on it have been negatively impacted particularly with regard to the distribution of agrifood and healthcare products. And this has been compounded by the behavior of speculators on the prowl to take advantage of these types of circumstances and other “fear shopping”. The remedy for this type of disturbance lies in the degree of coordination and firmness of the crisis management organizations in the affected country. The case of Morocco is interesting in that the supply of foodstuffs continues during this crisis, so to speak normally, and the examples of “purchases of panic fear” have been very isolated.

In our region, the case is rare enough to be highlighted when Europe currently seems to be doing worse than us Africans. Thus, the European single market on which Mr. Michel Barnier, EU chief negotiator on Brexit, pontificated in his interview at the end of February at Der Spiegel, declaring: “The single market is …the most important shared asset of the 27 EU member states… is the main reason Donald Trump respects us ”  has shown its limits in recent times.

In short, yesterday’s asset (single market) has turned into an obstacle to the EU’s management of this crisis. The rule applied today in Europe seems to be that of “every country for itself”.

Well, now according to the information available, the common market was first designed and implemented to make European countries complementary to each other in terms of the manufacture and movement of goods. But, as this health crisis has shown, each country would like to keep the healthcare equipment for itself and its own citizens first, which has exposed the EU slogan which promotes the concept of a European citizen with same rights and duties in any European country. Of course, in a time of exceptional constraint, as is the case with this Covid-19 crisis, people’s reactions may be below expectations. However, those responsible are in principle chosen to respond quickly and well in these circumstances.

In this regard, it is us in Morocco and elsewhere in Africa who are now giving Europeans the example of measured responses and the absence of panic over purchases of toilet paper and the like. It is our way as Africans to return courtesy to our neighbors in the north of the Mediterranean for having colonized us for centuries to “civilize” us.

As a corollary, by temporarily interrupting inter-country travel, this crisis puts us in Africa to the test of finding solutions to the crisis on our own. In Morocco, and I suppose elsewhere in Africa as well, our authorities have just made it clear that they no longer need a tutor to manage a crisis that strikes them, even a pandemic, and come out of it probably more serene.

This spirit of united work and discipline that characterizes our African countries during this Covid-19 crisis must now be applied to other African industrial and commercial sectors to show that Africa has all the assets to take charge completely and choose henceforth only the best bidder to do business with.

It should not be long.