The World Bank has lent Morocco $200 million to help the North African Kingdom strengthen its agricultural value chains for greater inclusion of small and medium producers.
With the increased productivity of Morocco’s agriculture sector over the past few years, driven by ambitious reforms under the Agriculture Plan, Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), the country aims to drive sector growth by promoting agri-business competitiveness and increasing agri-food market efficiency.
To support this effort, the WB approved the loan to accelerate the transformation of the agri-business sector towards greater value addition and market inclusion of small and medium producers and enterprises. Moving away from fragmented production to more integrated value chains will be among the core objectives of the program.
Strengthening Agri-food Value Chains, a comprehensive support program, will seek to promote an enabling environment for agri-food sector growth and to remove barriers to the development of targeted value chains.
To tackle some of the sector’s persistent challenges ranging from food safety and quality to limited integration of agri-food markets, the program will support institutional reforms and increased investments to ensure greater value-addition, improved market efficiency, and higher competitiveness.
“Building on previous Bank interventions to foster effective sector reforms as part of the PMV, the Bank is ramping up its engagement to support the government’s efforts to develop modern value chains that can be scaled up with greater impact for the rural populations,” says Marie Françoise Marie-Nelly, World Bank Maghreb Country Director.
“With the sector fabric dominated by small enterprises and cooperatives, the program intends to better include small and medium producers in a demanding and fast growing agri-food market”, adds the WB official.
The program builds on favorable market conditions and the achievements of the PMV to boost agri-business performance. Through structural and value-chain specific measures, the program will strengthen the capacity of two intra-branch organizations (inter-professions), covering citrus and olives. It will promote private sector investments in food processing units for these two high-potential value chains, including packing stations, cold storage, and olive oil pressing units.
To enhance agri-food market efficiency, the program will also support the modernization of the management model of new wholesale markets, and improve access to information on market prices through dedicated technological tools.
The program will include the piloting of new schemes to connect small producers with large buyers as a means to enhancing the participation of small and medium producers in the agri-food value chains.