Brussels, 05/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - Negotiation of an in-depth free-trade agreement between Morocco and the EU has reached the stage of “maturity”, said Ambassador Menouar Alem in Brussels during an interview with Le Matin, his country's daily. The new agreement, which will bolster the traditional free-trade agreement, has been under negotiation since March 2012. As things stand, the Moroccan ambassador points out, “99% of industrial products are exempted from customs duties and taxes” in Europe, as they are the other way round, in Morocco.
The new agreement will, the ambassador says, “give an even sounder basis for growing interest on the part of European and global investors”. It aims at “closing the regulatory gap between European directives and Moroccan legislation”. His country, he goes on to say, “is not starting from zero on the regulatory front” and has already agreed to transpose European directives and regulations into its own body of law under the Open Sky agreement on air transport. Menouar Alem goes on to say: “We shall evolve in sectors that Morocco considers to be a priority. This approach is accepted by the EU. We are using mechanisms hitherto reserved for accession countries, including the twinning mechanism”.
The agreement will take relations between the EU and Morocco further than “tomatoes and sardines”, the ambassador says, affirming that, “although Morocco holds a special position compared to other EU partners it is because it knows where it is going and is successful in what it wants to do”. The only dark cloud in the picture is the question of the Sahara which is often raised by the European Parliament as a result, the ambassador says, of “manoeuvring by a group of MEPs (…) who dogmatically defend the Polisario and what Algeria has to say on the Sahara issue for reasons that are either ideological or linked to specific, unstated interests” (our translation throughout). (FB/transl.jl)