Students in public schools in the wake of independence, like myself, know how the school programs that we were given reserved the lion’s share to metropolitan France. Except religion, we were served the French norms as models to everything, particularly for culture. I guess this was also the case for other Francophone countries, grouped mostly in Africa, which France had undertaken to civilize through an altruistic approach of which obviously nobody doubts. This image, idealizing the French people was supposed to guide us for the rest of our lives. But one day, watching a TV program that reported on French farmers preventing the landing of mutton on a Breton port, I was very surprised to hear my “landlady” treat French people as “ignorant” and “uneducated”. Regarding the recent history of mankind, the English believe they have spread civilization throughout the world where the British Empire ruled for several centuries on almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. This British epic gives the historical reason of the use of Anglo-Saxon standards, upon which the Americans built later on, by most countries in the world; first of all in pharmaceutical field and increasingly in the food industry which is the focus of this article.
The standards campaign
As representative, some time ago, of a German broker in Casablanca, for the sale of antibiotics and other raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry, I was invited by Promopharm to have coffee with the then president; who was interested in a little more comfortable payment deadline. Whereupon, I received order to deliver three tons of acetylsalicylic acid (raw material for aspirin). Shortly after, the purchasing manager asked me to come urgently in the company and in her presence, the pharmacist in charge asked me to recall my merchandise because (she told me) the Ministry of Health (to whom the finished product was intended) found, based on the Bulletin of Analysis of supplier (BA), the material in question was not consistent for human consumption. I took the opportunity to ask for a glass of water I drank, after adding two tablets of aspirin from batch already manufactured, inviting them to see how I was going to suffer before dying! It should be emphasized that the mentioned BA specified conformity of raw material to British and US pharmacopeias and said nothing about the French one. On the latter (edition of the time), the monograph of aspirin is similar to that of Anglo-Saxon pharmacopoeias except that it contains a non-specific additional “pseudo-test” which, therefore, adds no information to intrinsic quality of the product. But formally, it could allow a Moroccan administrative officer, profane of these lures, to conclude that requirements of French pharmacopoeia vis-à-vis this product is more assertive. In reality, this is just one example of countless others that the masters for a little while on Morocco have used to lock the domestic market exclusively to their profits in the hope that it lasts as long as possible, that is to say, forever.
Exegesis
With regard to international trade in pharmaceutical and food products, international standards originally defined by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) have overwhelmingly been inspired by the Anglo-Saxon practices which, in fact, reflect simply the predominant role of these standards in globalised trade. However, the application of these standards is still based on the will of states. So knowing how to do it, for example by deploying a wealth of ingenuity, where French people excel, to win the trust of some well placed Francophiles decision-makers, it is possible to persuade them for the preference of French standards on others. If, in addition, this preference is translated as a criterion for selecting materials, which is likely in the case of aspirin product mentioned above, then the work is complete and the Moroccan market (or another in sub-Saharan Africa, for example) has been duly locked in front of potential competitors of French operators. Since France does not produce all the materials that circulate in the world that a country may need, this results in very funny situations sometimes. If you want to pass a material produced somewhere in the world with our customs services without a problem, it is best to make it transit through France for normative formalities. But now, it’s a bit like seeing a movie translated into French. You pay extra for the translator. If by chance you are also dependent on this approach in the sense of export, it is possible that you will never find out what competitive word means. But this will not to displease the translator whose investment fund is summed up in everything and for everything in the language he taught you when you were a kid.
What about food
In the US, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) requires, from the nineties of the past century already, any physician to notify the center of each case of food borne illness observed during a consultation. The integration of these data over several years has shown that, for medical treatment and care for victims of foodborne diseases, the financial input for the US federal government (i.e. taxpayers), was of several billions per year; payment that must be borne in principle by the manufacturer and / or supplier of food products in question. Instead of making them pay the bill, complicated thing to implement, the US authorities have required of food operators the implementation of HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) for the prevention of hazards in foods while, in substance, such requirement was previously only applied for pharmaceuticals. The law, which came into force in January 1997, was to apply the same way to all those who sell processed foods in the US market, including, for example, exporters of Moroccan seafood products. I remember that in a few months all Moroccan professionals involved have made the huge effort needed to upgrade their work practices and continue to export to the market of Uncle Sam. Two thousand and two, the new law “Bioterrorism Act” has renewed the same scenario. Again, very disciplined, the national food exporters referred to, have quickly endorsed the new US regulations by providing the Federal Agency with all informations she asked them for. Most of these services were paid in foreign currency.
What about the respect to 28-07 Act?
The 28-07 Act of safety of food products and its application texts are fully in force since 2011 and, despite the grandiloquence of ONSSA (Office National de Sécurité Sanitaire des produits Alimentaires), only a few Moroccan professionals seem inclined to show some respect for the law. In many cases, the authorization of an operator under the new regulations is dependent on a little more hygiene, that is to say slightly more work without it actually causes more spending. So are we faced with two types of Moroccans, those who understand and apply and “I couldn’t-care-less persons”? The arguments abound on this aspect of things. But first, operators are they solely to blame in this resistance to law enforcement. I remember, in the case of a joint-venture with a US audit firm, the remark of a Moroccan operator who did not find meaning to our intervention as long as the professional was forced anyway to go through the EACCE (Etablissement Autonome de Coordination et Contrôle des Exportations) to be able to export to any market in the world. Asked about this, the vice president (my American supervisor) simply said: “We do a good job and the FDA knows. If these people want to go through the body you say or Paris, it is their business! “.
I do not think, in conclusion, that we are so many “I couldn’t-care-less persons” in Morocco. National operators who are eager to upgrade themselves, and harmonize their practices with the US regulations, comply with FDA requirements because they are convinced that this is the only way, and one that returns the least expensive, for the trade with the US market. Operators know the difference between an authority that says what she thinks and another that does not believe in what she says. It is time that those officials ONSSA adhere to the category of people who think what they say, and behave as such, so to give the chance to the 28-07 Act be implemented.
