Food sovereignty and climate crisis, SIAM in the eye of the storm

Photo credits: Ahmed Boussarhane/LNT

SIAM is above all a professional exhibition. This implies that for the many exhibitors, the opportunity is above all commercial, to make themselves known, improve their visibility and mark their presence among hundreds of thousands of visitors. As is often the case when a trade show takes place in Morocco, given the size and the sector concerned in this case, it is also the behemoths of agriculture and agri-food which are the most visible, with kilometric stands .

However, make no mistake, the SIAM is also and above all the tuning fork of national agricultural policy, almost taking on the appearance of an Agricultural Conference where the strategy of the State and operators, breeders to exporters through cooperatives, in short the entire value chain, is reframed or even called into question every year.

First, because what is covered by agriculture does not only concern primary products. If the country’s GDP is so much and always marked by the weight of the sector, it is because it not only provides a living for a large part of the population, but also because its famous value chain affects many other sectors, in industry in particular, for processing and export, but also increasingly in fundamental and applied research or even technology via what we call AgriTech.

Then, because the situation, economic and political, national and international, continually enters into the subject. The war in Ukraine has a direct impact on the price of cereals, the inflation which also results from it, European agricultural policy with more protectionist rules than ever, but also and above all, the water problem.

However, without bad faith, the paradigm changes that agriculture is experiencing cannot be achieved by a snap of the fingers. Drought is not a new fact in the history of our country, what is, however, is that we are beginning to produce mature reflection to move towards greater agricultural sovereignty with choices that are now justified and which can therefore claim to be sustainable.

Thus, the case of OCP and its entire ecosystem, from UM6P to its new subsidiary INNOVX, via OCP Africa, is eloquent because it testifies to the structural efforts that are being implemented to make Morocco, a leader in agricultural value chains in its ability to understand them, analyze them, support them, finance them and finally evaluate them in order to duplicate them.

With a holistic approach that goes from production to the final consumer, it is by mastering the subject from start to finish that we can hope to develop expertise on new agricultural systems in line with the climate crisis that Morocco is facing. Especially since through the action of Moroccan actors, the potential of Africa, which holds 60% of arable land in the world, is within reach.

This continent, which aims to feed the world, relies more and more on the expertise that Morocco deploys, crescendo. Because, in reality, it is an open secret that behind agriculture, wherever it is, there are subjects that are all the more strategic in a context marked by climate change and international instability, such as Covid. and the wars have intensified. Food security is now combined with sovereignty and this is the real issue which gives SIAM a growing political aspect each year, beyond the sectoral high mass that it represents.

Zouhair Yata

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