Yahoo Finances
By Aziz El Yaakoubi
Morocco will retain its 30 percent customs duty on imported soft wheat until the end of the year to ensure adequate supplies for the domestic market, the agriculture minister said on Wednesday.
Morocco harvested a record 11 million tonnes of the grain after good rains last year, but this year’s crop is expected to fall sharply after the worst weather in a decade.
Drought had pushed millers and wheat importers in Morocco to ask the government to extend an import window and allow an earlier start to next season’s imports.
“Thirty percent is good for the actual prices in the international market and we won’t change them until the end of the year,” Agriculture Minister Aziz Akhannouch told Reuters on the sideline of an annual agriculture fair in Meknes.
Morocco’s import campaign typically runs from October through April, after which tariffs are raised to prohibitive levels in order to protect the local harvest.
Cereal production in Morocco is expected to slump from a record 11 million tonnes last year to between 3 and 4 million in 2016, officials and analysts say. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s attache in Morocco forecast cereal production to reach 4.7 million tonnes, down 58 percent from last year.
Moroccan cereal imports would reach 4.6 million tonnes in the next import season, including 3.9 million tonnes of wheat and 0.7 million of barley, the U.S. report added.
Wheat imports jumped 10.6 percent from a year earlier in the first three months of 2016 to 3.48 billion dirhams ($360 million) from the same period in the last year.
For the first time in years, Morocco’s agriculture ministry postponed announcing the annual harvest size. It usually releases the data at the opening of the agriculture fair in the city of Meknes in the last week of April.
“This is a special year, we are still gathering information,” Akhannouch said, adding figures will be announced in two weeks.
Agriculture accounts for more than 15 percent of the economy so the weak harvest is expected to crimp gross domestic product growth. Morrocco’s central bank expects GDP to grow 1 percent in 2016, slowing sharply from 4.4 percent in 2015.
($1 = 9.6565 Moroccan dirham)
(Reporting by Aziz El Yaakoubi; editing by Jason Neely/Ruth Pitchford)
