Marrakech – Beijing has formally approached Rabat about signing a bilateral free trade agreement, Morocco’s Industry and Trade Minister Ryad Mezzour disclosed in a Bloomberg interview published June 12. The revelation redraws the contours of an already combustible triangle linking Chinese capital, Moroccan ambition, and European anxiety.
“It is under reflection,” Mezzour told the outlet, confirming that Morocco is conducting a granular impact assessment but has not initiated formal negotiations.
The calculus is straightforward yet freighted with consequence: a pact with the world’s second-largest economy would pry open China’s 1.4-billion-consumer market for Moroccan manufacturers while diluting an entrenched commercial dependence on Europe that has defined the kingdom’s trade architecture for decades.
The overture arrives at a moment of extraordinary bilateral velocity. Trade between Morocco and China vaulted to $10.96 billion in 2025 from $9.04 billion the previous year, with Beijing entrenched as Rabat’s third-largest trading partner globally and its foremost in Asia.
Yet the ledger remains brutally asymmetric. Chinese exports to Morocco totaled $9.88 billion against a mere $1.08 billion flowing in the opposite direction. Beijing’s zero-tariff regime for 53 African nations, operative since May 1, is partly calibrated to compress that deficit, and the China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo (CAETE), held on African soil for the first time in Casablanca from June 10 to 12, furnished the commercial stage.
Over 200 Chinese firms exhibited across five sectors – technology, agri-food, consumer goods, automotive, and energy – many actively scouting partners on the continent.
Morocco is not without exportable ammunition. The country commands over 90% of the global argan oil supply – a sector Grand View Research projects will swell from $90.1 million in 2025 to $212.2 million by 2033 – and its phosphate reserves, the world’s largest at 50 billion metric tons, underpin a fertilizer export machine that constitutes roughly 20% of national export revenue.
Citrus, olive oil, cobalt, and an expanding automotive-components base round out the offensive toolkit. Yet history counsels sobriety. Morocco’s free trade agreement with the United States, now two decades old, produced a cautionary template: total bilateral trade quadrupled, but the US goods surplus ballooned from $35 million in 2005 to $3.4 billion by 2024.
A Brookings Institution study published in late 2025 concluded the pact exerted “an overall negative effect on Moroccan exports, including strategic sectors such as agri-food and automotive.” Replicating that trade imbalance with a partner running a nine-to-one surplus would be commercially perilous.
Tariff turbulence nudges Rabat toward Beijing
Yet the protectionist convulsion sweeping Washington lends the Chinese overture a certain strategic rationality. The Trump administration’s April 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs slapped a 10% levy on Moroccan goods – despite the two-decade-old bilateral FTA – before the US Supreme Court struck down the entire IEEPA tariff framework in a landmark 6-3 ruling in February 2026.
Washington promptly pivoted to Section 122 authority, reimposing a 10% global surcharge that the Court of International Trade invalidated again in May, though collection persists pending appeal, and the tariffs expire July 24 unless Congress intervenes.
In the midst of cascading American protectionism and legal entropy, Beijing is sprinting in the opposite direction by unilaterally dismantling tariff walls for 53 African nations. For a kingdom whose entire industrial strategy rests on preferential market access, the directional contrast is impossible to discount.
Accordingly, Mezzour cautioned that any agreement would demand rigorous consultation with businesses and government stakeholders and must be weighed against Morocco’s existing web of preferential trade arrangements. “We need to evaluate what impact it would have on our economy,” and how it might affect existing free trade agreements, the minister told Bloomberg.
Morocco has spent two decades assembling a formidable export-oriented industrial base spanning automobiles, aerospace, and batteries, buttressed by free trade pacts with dozens of markets and nations, including the European Union and the United States.
A parallel agreement with Chile is also in the offing, Mezzour revealed, with the pact designed to funnel Moroccan automobile exports into the South American Mercosur bloc.
A tightrope strung between Brussels and Beijing
The geopolitical friction, predictably, emanates from Brussels. Roughly $6 billion in Chinese capital has cascaded into Morocco since the Covid pandemic, according to Rhodium Group data, clustered heavily around Tanger Tech City, where firms like BTR New Material Group and APG are erecting battery-component and brake-manufacturing facilities at breakneck pace.
Gotion High-tech, 25% owned by Volkswagen, is constructing a $1.3 billion gigafactory in Kenitra. EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič has publicly branded the investment pattern as “transshipment” of Chinese overcapacity through trade partners, calling it “a big, big issue for the European economy.”
Brussels has already imposed tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese electric vehicles and last year penalized Moroccan aluminium wheel exports after determining they benefited from subsidies traceable to both Rabat and Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Mezzour flatly dismissed these anxieties, reiterating that Morocco remains open to foreign investment regardless of origin. The kingdom’s own trade officials counter the backdoor accusation with a procedural defense: exports to Europe must satisfy stringent rules of origin demanding substantial local transformation before qualifying for preferential market access.
Yet the structural tension is irreducible. Morocco, the African Development Bank (AfDB)’s top-ranked industrial economy on the continent, occupies a singular perch. It is the first African signatory to the Belt and Road Initiative, host to over $10 billion in committed Chinese investment, and significantly, the EU’s deeply embedded manufacturing partner, with Renault and Stellantis operating major assembly plants on its soil.
The country’s phosphate monopoly, cobalt reserves, and lithium deposits make it an indispensable node in the new-energy supply chain that connects Chinese processing, Moroccan resources, and European end markets. Ahmed Aboudouh of Chatham House has warned that China could “dominate the whole vertical supply chain” in the country, from phosphate processing to port infrastructure.
The question Rabat now confronts is not whether to engage Beijing – that train departed years ago – but whether a formalized free trade agreement can deepen the relationship without detonating its most consequential one in Brussels.
