Morocco said on Friday it would hike customs duties on cereal imports soon to let farmers benefit from a second straight bumper harvest, which is expected to exceed last year's in both quality and quantity.
Morocco last year raised by up to 130 percent customs duties on soft wheat, after announcing an 8.0 million-tonne harvest of cereals. A little under half of that was in soft wheat.
"This year's harvest will exceed that of last year in both quantity and quality," an Agriculture Ministry spokesman said. He gave no figure.
Official figures show that average rainfall this year was 15 percent above the average of the past three decades.
"We'll raise duties on cereals imports soon," the spokesman said, citing June 1 as a possible date.
That would coincide with the official start of the new import campaign, and is the same date as last year's increase in customs duties.
A ministry statement later reiterated that the harvest would improve in 2004, and apparently anticipating the higher duty said it intended to ensure "enough protection at borders for the local cereals crop".
"These measures also aim at improving the market quality of local soft wheat thanks to new and appropriate quality norms...for transactions between traders and milling firms," it said.
Problems of quality affecting mainly soft wheat marred last year's bumper harvest for Moroccan farmers. They were in fact seen as the main reason for lowering, and later scrapping the increase to respond to high demand by the local market for good quality wheat, which meant facilitating imports.
"If the harvest really turns out to be better in quality and quantity than last year, then this can only mean less business for us importers," said the manager of a private trading house.
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