Rabat – Morocco’s sweet potato exports are steadily increasing by an average of 67% per year, quadrupling to 130 tonnes in January 2023, according to the horticulture analytics platform East Fruit.
“In just a few years, Moroccan exporters launched the exports of sweet potatoes literally from scratch, entering the premium markets of the EU countries and the Middle East,” East Fruit reported.
The platform’s data suggest that Morocco’s sweet potato exports nearly quadrupled to 130 tonnes in January 2023, setting a new record.
According to East Fruit data, Morocco doubled its supply volume to a record 1 200 tonnes in 2022, marking the first time in the country’s history that sweet potatoes were exported without interruption on a monthly basis.
European countries are the biggest destinations for Moroccan sweet potatoes, with the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK being the top-3 largest consumers of Moroccan sweet potatoes in 2022.
Morocco has a “strong presence” in EU countries, East Fruit noted, highlighting that the country took the first steps to “open the market of the Persian Gulf countries” in 2022.
Last year, countries of the Middle East imported about 9 tonnes of sweet potatoes from Morocco, with Qatar and Bahrain being the main consumers.
Meanwhile, Morocco’s exports of sweet potatoes to Spain and France have not exceeded 4% since 2019.
Additionally, the North African country delivered nearly 100% of exports to the German market in 2017, but afterwards the supplies stopped.
Morocco’s agriculture industry could set a new record for avocado exports in the 2022-23 season, with the North African country having exported 35 500 tonnes from July 2022 to January 2023.
Morocco’s avocado production has steadily increased over the last five years: the country moved from the world’s 12th largest exporter to ninth by the end of 2022.
Morocco has also recently outperformed the US, becoming the fourth largest blueberry exporter in the world.
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