Vietnam''s fisheries minister Ta Quang Ngoc was given red-carpet treatment during a working visit to Morocco last month when he was accorded a meeting with prime minister Driss Jettou.
The significance of the meeting serves to highlight how Morocco is expanding fisheries trade with other developing countries, following the EU's failure to convince Morocco to sign a long-term deal for EU vessels in Moroccan waters.
M. Jettou said, according to Arab agency reports, that the prime minister emphasised the importance of cooperation in the fisheries sector and the fact that Morocco is very interested in learning know-how from Vietnam in the fish-farming sector. There are plans for Vietnamese experts to work on this in Morocco, the reports said.
This comes against a background of fish production and job creation plans by the fisheries minister M. Taieb Rhafès. The aim is reported to be to increase the current production from 930,000 tpa to two million tpa by 2007 and create 90,000 new fish-related jobs at the same time. This would include 15,000 tonnes from fish farming.
The future value of that kind of production will depend on how far Morocco continues to expand its value-added processing sector away from the export of raw material. Morocco already has a major presence in the European bottled and canned anchovy market, for example.
The government has a long-standing aim also of doubling national per head annual consumption of fish to around 14kg, and this is part of a strategy to make the country more food-sufficient and less import-dependent.
The Vietnamese are becoming active across the region and minister Ngoc has signed a similar collaboration agreement on personnel and know-how transfer with Egypt.
