AfDB Lends Morocco €199 Mln for Climate Resilient Crops

The African Development Bank has approved a €199 million loan to finance Morocco’s competitive & resilient cereal development program to help boost food security, nutrition, and crops resilience across Africa.

The program will help reduce Morocco’s cereal imports, focusing on improving productivity and the resilience of cereal production to climate change. It also provides for structural reforms that will lead to more efficient and resilient production systems.

“With this new program, we share a strong ambition to strengthen the performance of the cereal sector and consolidate its climate resilience through renewed governance,” said Martin Fregene, Director of Agriculture & Agribusiness at the AfDB.

“Our support builds on previous achievements which, over more than a decade, have enabled the agricultural sector to move from a production logic to a transformation dynamic, which creates many more jobs in rural areas”, he added.

For his part, Achraf Hassan Tarsim, AfDB Country Manager for Morocco, said the loan will help increase cereal productivity by 50%, reduce cereal imports by 20% by 2030 and increase farmers’ income.

During the past fifty years, the African Development Bank has injected over $12 billion in projects carried out in Morocco in farming, energy, water, transport, human development and financial sectors.