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Rabat – OCP Group, a world-leading fertilizer company and the world’s largest phosphate mining company, is pursuing its commitment to improve the agricultural value chain in Morocco and across Africa through the Al Moutmir initiative.
Launched in 2018, the outreach initiative focuses on farmers as real agents of change to ensure sustainable agriculture and food systems by assisting and providing farmers, cooperatives, and agri-entrepreneurs with solutions that enable them to expand their production growth.
As several climate-related challenges continue to impact farmers’ productivity, Al Moutmir initiative aims at empowering rural farmers and cooperatives to boost the agricultural ecosystem in Morocco.
Sustainable management of Morocco’s agriculture
The initiative, has so far supported directly more than 50,000 farmers across the country in increasing their productivity in a sustainable way, and over 300,000 farmers via the mobile application @tmar.
@tmar is the first application for nationwide extension services; it has been offering its services since 2019 with an aim to support local farmers and make scientific information available to all and for free.
Free of charge, the application provides farmers with more insights and facilitates decision-making regarding their agricultural activity, particularly on the technical, agronomic, and economic aspects.
Morocco World News spoke to Fatiha Charradi, Vice-President in charge of agricultural development at OCP Group, who underlined that the group’s engineers are deployed in several provinces to work hand in hand with local farmers.
Of Al Moutmir’s philosophy of ensuring the sustainability of Morocco’s agricultural sector, Charradi said that the program relies on the scientific approach as a key driver of prosperous and sustainable productivity.
The program also operates based on a participatory and inclusive approach that connects communities in order to implement customized solutions with and for the ecosystem.
“[ OCP continuously stimulates the innovation loop with the various stakeholders to respond with agility to the challenges of the ecosystem and bring out new solutions, adapted and affordable to all,” Charradi explained.
The initiative’s approach also focuses on supporting farmers through integrated capacity-building programs to become “agri-preneurs” and consider agriculture as a real business from which they can make profitable benefits.
OCP Group “believes that achieving sustainable agriculture and food security involves investment in innovation and new technologies,” Charradi noted.
In this sense, she highlighted that OCP Al Moutmir deploys technological and innovative tools that contribute to increasing the quantity of food produced while optimizing the inputs needed to make agriculture more productive and sustainable.
OCP began fertilizer production in the 1960s, and the company’s dominance in the African market and increasing global outreach in recent years have played a decisive role in Morocco ranking in the top 5 fertilizer exporters worldwide.
When asked about the pivotal role of the scientific research applied in the program to ensure the sustainability of investments, Charradi emphasized that the adoption of such an approach in farming “allows an efficient management of the farm and of the natural resources available.”
With reasoned fertilization being a lever for the development of the agriculture sector, she stressed, “the use of adapted and customized fertilizers has enabled farmers to achieve a significant improvement not only in terms of productivity but also in the quality of their agricultural production.”
Al Moutmir insights
Al Moutmir demonstration platforms saw an increase of 25% of yield in cereals, 27% for olive trees, and 37% for vegetables and other crops.
The scientific-technical itinerary adopted in the demonstration platforms, Charradi noted that it “enabled the efficient management of irrigation water, thanks to the management of irrigation according to the needs of the crops and the particularities of each plot.”
Meanwhile, the customized NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) formulas recorded +21% of yield in cereals, +25% of yield in pulses, +20% of yield in Olive trees.
As for the no-till program, it witnessed +18% of yield improvement, enabling farmers to reduce their costs of production and gain on average more than MAD 1,300 ($138) per hectare while improving their net margins by over 55.4%.
The no-till farming is an agricultural technique for growing crops or pasture without disturbing the soil through tillage. The technique is designed to enable farmers to test their soil and understand the crops before farming.
“Thanks to digital tools like the mobile Application @tmar, Agripedia, and the Smart Blender, farmers managed to simulate their farming income at the beginning of each agricultural season,” Charradi added.
The Smart Blender technology consists in manufacturing Blend NPK formulas for each agricultural plot based on its own soil testing results.
With the program model being mainly oriented toward small-scale farmers, OCP’s mission is to help them maintain and increase their income by providing them with innovative tools and solutions to boost their production capacity while reducing their farming costs.
According to statistics stressed by Charradi, farmers improved their yearly net margin by +36% moving, from MAD 5,459 ($582)/ha to MAD 7,472 ($796)/ha for cereals; by +32% for pulses, jumping from MAD 3,680 ($392) per hectare to MAD 4,850 ($517)/ha; and by +32 % for olives, showing a price increase from MAD 9,300 ($991)/ha to MAD 12,250 ($1306)/ha.
UM6P’s support to OCP Al Moutmir
Founded on the promotion of training, applied research, and innovation for the benefit of Morocco and Africa, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) of Benguerir supports Al Moutmir teams and the entire agricultural ecosystem in Morocco and more broadly in Africa.
The University’s tech-driven methods for education provide operational support to Al Moutmir participants by letting them benefit from several infrastructures: soil testing laboratories, experimental farms, innovation platforms, incubators, and many other levers.
UM6P also mobilizes national and international agronomy experts who provide their knowledge and scientific support to the teams, with the objective of addressing the agricultural challenges and contributing to the emergence of inclusive agricultural development models that create sustainable value and impact.
“Al Moutmir is for sure a business use case for OCP, but it is also and above all a use case supported by the vast scientific community interested in the development of the agricultural sector in Africa,” vice-president Charradi underlined.
OCP-Al Moutmir has also forged partnerships with agribusiness professionals, enabling farmers to expand their products to bigger and international markets as well.
With its different partners, Al Moutmir will launch T@swiq, a mobile application for selling and buying agricultural products while reducing logistic costs and increasing farmers’ profit margins.
“Beyond the direct community of farmers we are working with, our ambition is to work hand in hand with the ecosystem to support the 1.5 million farmers across the Kingdom [of Morocco] to enable them to increase their yields, their annual income, and live with dignity from agriculture,” she added.
Future challenges
Water scarcity, shrinking land size, and climate change are more worrying than ever for African countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation.
Charradi underlined that beyond those problems, there is also “a lack of local coordination on the use of the most suitable crops for each farm and for each agroclimatic zone along with the product commercialization prior to any cropping.”
When asked about how Al Moutmir aims to tackle such persisting challenges to ensure sustainable development, she outlined that OCP works alongside its many partners to harness the power of digital technologies to intensify innovative initiatives with high potential for impact in food and farming.
As a true accelerator of development, the program’s digital technology helps transform solutions into meaningful services, easily accessible to all and for free, she suggested.
“At OCP Al Moutmir, we strongly believe that innovation and technology are key levers to overcome the gap in the sector and support its transformation,” Charradi said, noting that their initiatives are all driven by the “low tech for high impact” motto.
Low technology, Charradi explained, means taking the best of what has been developed so far, and adapting it to the African socio-economic context while making sure it will deliver economically viable and socially acceptable solutions.
As such, OCP Group’s Al Moutmir program is an integral part of the Moroccan company’s commitment to the development of the agricultural ecosystem in Morocco and Africa, by deploying different technologies, tools, and approaches to empower rural farmers and cooperatives and inspire African youth.
“African development needs its own models that suit us and answer our real needs,” Charradi stressed.
