Energy and food imports alongside a growing trade deficit put pressure on Morocco’s foreign currency reserves.

Personne n’aurait misé sur de bonnes récoltes cette année au Maroc tant la situation pluviométrique était catastrophique au début de la campagne. Pourtant, les résultats obtenus jusqu’ici sont pour le moins encourageants pour certaines cultures. Mais ces performances sont à relativiser par la hausse des intrants, la baisse des marges et le risque d’une nouvelle sécheresse en 2023.  L’hécatombe tant redoutée de la campagne agricole n’aura finalement pas lieu.

The global food crisis spurred by fighting in Ukraine is affecting the Middle East in uneven ways. Countries such as Lebanon and Yemen, struggling with economic instability and conflict before the war began, have been hit particularly hard. Egypt, which is deeply reliant on wheat and other grains from Ukraine and Russia, has also struggled to manage the crisis and keep food supplies stable. 

Perceiving a threat to its strategic wheat reserves following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the Egyptian government initially planned to turn to local production to close the gap, though it would later resort to additional wheat imports from the war-inflated export markets.

Recurrent food crises and shocks in the world necessitate immediate national as well as global responses to provide short-term relief and longer-term policy change. As economies began recovering from the global COVID-19 pandemic during 2021, the Russian-Ukraine crisis emerged and has become a major setback to global recovering, sparking another global food security crisis. Some countries are particularly vulnerable, including those experiencing uneven economic recovery due to the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict-affected and fragile economies, and low-income countries with high levels of food import dependence.

Turkey next week will host Russian, Ukrainian and UN officials for talks aimed at resuming stalled grain exports across the Black Sea, local media reported Tuesday.
The meeting in Istanbul would be preceded by a visit to Moscow by a Turkish defence delegation this week, NTV television and CNN Turk cited Turkish presidential sources as saying.

The World Bank has agreed to provide Egypt $500 million in development funds to boost food security in light of the repercussions faced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war, according to a statement by the Ministry of International Cooperation.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Ministry of Int’l […]

Egypt is paying the price of disruption to vital wheat imports and sharply rising import costs due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, prompting Cairo to take new measures to secure adequate reserves.
The disruption has raised fears that Egypt could face a shortage of flour needed for the subsidised bread that is available to more than 70 million of the country's 103 million population.

The global food price index of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) made headlines when it reached its all-time record in March. And rightly so, as it suggested an increasingly difficult situation for food security globally, particularly for lower-income consumers who already struggle to afford healthy food and for humanitarian programs challenged to feed a growing number of people facing crisis-level hunger.

Farming sustainably means leaving something to the earth rather than destroying agricultural land for years.

Egypt and France are boosting their bilateral cooperation, especially with respect to temperature-tolerant and sustainable crops, in the midst of Egypt's preparations to hold the COP27 conference at the end of this year.

L'alimentation ne sert pas qu'à approvisionner les populations : elle alimente aussi des rêves de puissance à l'international. En Europe, on l'avait un peu oublié, à l'inverse d'autres régions du globe.…