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Casablanca – The fuel price pressure is no longer limited to Morocco’s gas stations. It is now visible in Casablanca’s wholesale food flows, Fez freight corridors, and intercity transport networks linking Agadir, Marrakech, Rabat, and Tangier.
Diesel prices have climbed from MAD 12.79 to MAD 14.50 per liter since April 1, while gasoline rose from MAD 13.92 to MAD 15.60, according to industry data and international trackers.
The immediate fallout has been most visible in the fruit and vegetable trade moving from the Souss-Massa farming basin around Agadir toward Casablanca and Rabat wholesale markets, where transporters say the added diesel burden is already pushing up logistics invoices.
Growing concern is emerging that the higher cost of moving tomatoes, onions, citrus, and other produce from southern farms to urban distribution hubs could directly raise retail food prices in major cities.
In Fez and the wider Fez-Meknes region, the National Coordination of Road Freight Transport Unions went further, warning that the latest diesel jump of MAD 1.70 in less than a month is putting some trucking companies at risk of suspension.
The group said some operators hauling goods between Fez, Casablanca, Tangier Med, and inland industrial zones are struggling to preserve margins as fuel now eats into nearly every shipment. It even called for emergency subsidies reaching MAD 15,000 for road tractors, MAD 9,000 for trucks above 19 tons, and a temporary fuel price cap.
That is the lived backdrop against which the Competition Council claimed the fuel market showed “no anti-competitive behavior.”
In its latest note, the Council asserted that “no anti-competitive conduct was identified on the market.” But the same report also admitted that distributors continue to revise prices on identical dates with nearly matching increases, a practice it said “tends to limit the flexibility of tariff adjustments.”
That acknowledgment reflects the gap many consumers see between official claims of competition and the near-uniform prices on the ground.
If operators across Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, and Fez move prices almost simultaneously, drivers and transport companies experience something that feels less like competition and more like a nationwide synchronized rise.
The Council also argued that this behavior partly comes from the old regulated system, when prices changed on the 1st and 16th of each month, adding that in a liberalized market this calendar is “becoming less and less relevant.” Yet what people are seeing on the ground is brutally relevant.
A truck carrying vegetables from Agadir’s Souss farms to Casablanca’s Wholesale Market, a taxi driver in Rabat filling up twice a day, or a bus operator on the Casablanca-Fez route all face the same math. Higher diesel means higher fares, higher produce costs, and higher prices in neighborhood stores.
So while the Council portrayed the market as technically competitive, the reality across Morocco’s cities suggests a different truth. The increase has moved beyond fuel into food inflation, freight costs, taxi fares, and intercity passenger transport, turning a market report into a broader cost-of-living story.
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