Economic Competitiveness of the Meat Sub-sector in Morocco: The Case of Beef and Poultry

The meat sub-sector is among the most important agricultural sub-sectors in Morocco. Since the middle of the 1980s, red meat and poultry underwent deep reforms, all related to trade and price liberalization. Nowadays, with the prospects of growing market liberalization in the context of multilateral (WTO) and bilateral (FTA with the US, the Association Agreement with the EU) agreements, the question of the domestic meat competitiveness is being raised more than before. The objective of this paper is to contribute to answering that question using appropriate quantitative tools. The methodology is based on the value-chain concept and uses nominal and effective coefficients along with the domestic resource coefficient (DRC) to assess domestic comparative advantage. Policy Analysis Matrix (PAM) allows us to implement alternative policy experiments related to bilateral and multilateral commitments. The calculation of the cost-competitiveness index shows that Moroccan beef (Standard bone-in meat) and poultry could not compete with French and American products. However, Moroccan beef remains relatively more competitive than poultry. Besides, the DRC is 1 for beef and 1.34 for poultry meaning that Morocco seems to have no comparative advantage in producing poultry while neutrality is registered for beef. Lastly, among interesting policy experiments, the combined scenario of an import tariff reduction, currency devaluation and a technical progress shows the best impact on the domestic meat competitiveness. In fact, with this scenario which aims at larger Moroccan market openness, the DRC improves by 21% for beef and 31% for poultry. This is also the only experiment that allows probable comparative advantage for poultry in Morocco.