Marruecos: mascarillas para la diplomacia del coronavirus
As a result of the Moroccan authorities decreeing the mandatory use of masks in the streets since April 7, masks have become the star of public opinion and have been publicised in Morocco in recent days. To date, according to the head of Industry and Commerce, Moulay Hafid Elalamy, 13 million masks have been distributed among businesses, 100% 'made in Morocco'. The neighbouring country, which has 35 million inhabitants to protect, has stood out because of the tough containment measures adopted -among them the state of health emergency, in force in principle until April 20th- when the coronavirus epidemic was still in an early stage. The management of the crisis is being praised inside and outside the Maghreb borders.
Morocco, the minister said on Monday, "has exceeded daily production of 3.2 million masks and as of Tuesday will reach 5 million a day. The aim of the Moroccan authorities is to reach 80 million units. The masks are one of the few effective elements to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. And they have become a sought-after object of desire. After announcing that part of the national stock would be sold abroad, Rabat does not want to get rid of any of these items.
"We have decided to provide the public with these protective masks by putting them on sale in more than 60,000 local shops," explained the head of Moroccan Industry and Commerce in statements reported by the local digital newspaper Le360. The minister admitted that packs of 50 and 100 masks are no longer sold in order to avoid contamination of the masks. The Government will now market them in packs of 10 units.
The masks - subsidised by the State through the special solidarity fund dedicated to alleviating the consequences of the pandemic, which has received private and public contributions since 15 March and has exceeded 3 billion euros - are sold in neighbourhood grocery stores and large shopping centres at a fixed price: 80 dirhams cents per unit, the equivalent of 7 euro cents. Failure to wear a mask when going out is punishable by fines and even imprisonment under the current state of health emergency decree.
According to data from the local magazine TelQuel, at least seven Moroccan companies have benefited from the certificate of conformity issued by the Moroccan Institute of Standardisation. Among them, the company SoftTech, which announced last month that it would offer 10 million masks to the government, Micagricol or IKS.
On the other hand, after meeting with representatives of the pharmaceutical sector, on Monday the Minister of Industry stressed that the sector has the responsibility to "accompany the citizens in this period of crisis", in words stated by the state agency MAP. The President of the National Council of the Order of Pharmacists, Hamza Guedira, said on Monday that pharmacies will also begin to sell subsidized masks for general use. The Minister of Industry recalled that so far pharmacies only sell the medical masks, whose price is higher than those being distributed in local shops and supermarkets.
After the contrary was stated on Tuesday of last week, the authorities of the neighbouring country backed down on Friday and the domestically produced masks intended for the general public will not be exported despite growing foreign demand, including from Spain. "We will export to Europe and neighbouring countries very soon", said the minister in an interview with the Al Oula channel on April 6th before turning back. Efe's delegate in Rabat, Javier Otazu, assured the same day that health shipments from Morocco to Spain were already being negotiated.
The decision announced by Elalamy - the most active member of the cabinet over these past days of crisis, with Prime Minister El Othmani keeping a low profile - came two days after it was announced that Spain was suspending supplies to Morocco of certain generic medicines in the wake of the pandemic. The Spanish Drug Agency, in a report published by El Mundo and reported by various Moroccan media, claimed that there was a "shortage" of drugs in order to suspend current sales contracts. Among the medicines demanded by Morocco which, according to this information, will not be distributed to the neighbouring country, is chloroquine, which Moroccan health centres have been prescribing in a generalised way for weeks to patients with coronavirus. Spain will act with Morocco in a similar way to Turkey with our country.
The Spanish Embassy in Rabat later denied that there had been a seizure of the medicines. "The news in question referred to three specific consignments of medicines destined for Morocco, all of which have been authorised by the Spanish Agency of Medicine (AEMPS) for export" to the neighbouring country. "In Spain, as in other countries, in cases of increased need for medicines, the AEMPS can review and provisionally withhold export consignments to analyse whether they comply with the requirements".
The truth is that on Good Friday itself, King Mohammed VI and King Philip VI, respective heads of state of Morocco and Spain, held a telephone conversation in which, according to reports from the King's House, they spoke of the need for the international community to give a joint response to the coronavirus pandemic. However, it did not transpire that the monarchs addressed the issue of masks.
And from Spain to France, another fundamental country for the Moroccan economy and diplomacy. The French opposition, especially from nationalist sectors, has used the masks in recent days to criticise President Emmanuel Macron by praising the way in which Morocco has turned to the local production of sanitary material. The French head of state admitted on Monday night when he announced the extension of the confinement that masks are scarce in his country. Social networks are flooded these days with memes and comparisons between the management of health material by the Moroccan and French authorities.
In times of confinement, social networks have become a place of debate in Morocco, and in the last few days videos have been circulating in Morocco demonstrating the apparent low quality of many of the masks produced in the Maghreb country. However, local authorities are making an effort to defend that the goods that are being produced under time pressure have all the health guarantees.
In order to guarantee that the masks comply with the appropriate technical characteristics, the Ministry of Industry is preparing a decree specifying them, which, according to the communications director of the aforementioned government department in an interview with the Moroccan weekly TelQuel, will become a reality in the coming days.
Meanwhile, the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Morocco remains an enigma in view of the scarcity of screening tests that have been carried out. According to official figures, at the time of writing Morocco had declared 1,763 cases and 126 deaths.
The truth is that the combination of the coronavirus crisis and the year's drought - in a country highly dependent on agricultural production - suggests that the current year will be a particularly bad one for Morocco. In the opinion of Ahmed Lahlimi, head of the official Moroccan statistical agency, the High Commission for the Plan (HCP), in an interview with the Efe agency, the current year will be the worst one so far in this century.
The head of the institution believes that the state has known how to face this exceptional situation by mobilising internal resources and social initiatives promoted by King Mohamed VI and supported by the government.
In Lahlimi's view, the crisis is multidimensional because no sector will be spared: in addition to agriculture and tourism (which account for 20 per cent of GDP), the pandemic will also have consequences for other primary and secondary sectors (crafts or the agro-food industry, for example). Automotive, phosphate and textile exports, which together with tourism and migrant remittances are the country's main source of foreign exchange, will also be affected.
"We are suffering from the crisis in the automobile sector, which represents more than 20% of our exports; phosphates continue to hold up, but they are suffering from the effects of falling volumes and prices, while textiles are in the same situation. It is like a chain of blows", he stressed in the interview with Efe journalist Fatima Zohra Bouaziz. In its latest projections, the HCP indicated that the Moroccan economy will fall by up to -1.8% in the second quarter of this year, with estimated losses of 10.9 billion dirhams (970 million euros) in this same period.
In view of all these blows, Lahlimi believes that growth rates "will surely be negative" in Morocco, also because the country cannot escape the difficult situation that its regional environment is experiencing, particularly in the European Union, with which the Maghreb country maintains 70% of its economic exchanges.
The feared recession will take Morocco back to the 1990s, when it experienced three years of negative growth culminating in 1995 with a 6.5% collapse of the national GDP due to drought, in an economy that was (and still is, although to a lesser extent) heavily dependent on agriculture.
If the current health crisis had not occurred, according to data from the HCP in its latest quarterly report, the Moroccan economy would have grown by 1.9% year-on-year in the first quarter of the year. Lahlimi was also in favour of resorting to internal or external borrowing when necessary to finance investments, but not operating expenses, even if this means increasing the public deficit.
In this sense, he was critical of the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not to exceed certain growth ceilings. "Some indicators should not be mitigated. The 2 or 3% deficit is a myth and growth that has to be 6% is another. Growth does not depend on the level but rather on the content. Will it create jobs and income? Are there not social inequalities in this growth? This is the most important thing", concluded the head of the High Commission for the Plan in the above-mentioned interview.