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Rabat – On Tuesday, MP Ahmed Touizi made headlines following his statement in the parliament, in which he said that some companies “grind paper and present it as a subsidized flour.”
Touizi, head of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), made his remarks during a debate sparked by PAM’s group over the wheat subsidies, which cost Morocco MAD 16 billion ($1.73 billion) annually.
“Wheat subsidies costing the country over MAD 16 billion — where is the money going? Some are just ‘grinding paper.’ There should be stricter measures and controls. This is literally MAD 16 billion. In some regions, the subsidized flour is inedible. These funds should go directly to citizens. Issues like this must be addressed urgently by this government and future ones as well,” the MP said.
In response, the National Federation of Mills issued a statement, rejecting the “false allegations” made by Touizi.
The federation described the accusations as “completely unfounded and unsupported by any objective evidence.”
The federation president, Abdelkader Alaoui, said such remarks also undermine the credibility of a “strategic sector” directly linked to Morocco’s food security.
Facing backlash, Touzi issued a clarification statement, saying his comment was a “figurative expression in Moroccan dialect.”
He said that he didn’t mean that mills are mixing paper with flour, but rather he was describing the manipulation of documents and invoices submitted to the relevant authorities to obtain public subsidies.
“First, the intended meaning of this expression was never literal or physical. It was used as a figurative expression common in our Moroccan dialect,” Touizi wrote on his Facebook.
He further clarified that he never accused anyone of “mixing or blending non-edible materials with flour or any other food products.”
“From an economic and practical standpoint, the idea of ‘grinding paper’ in its literal sense makes no sense, since the price of paper is much higher than that of flour, making such a claim completely implausible,” he added.
He also expressed that his works have been “taken out of their true context,” accusing “certain parties” of distorting his remarks to make online buzz at the expense of public interest.
He concluded that the purpose of his intervention was to draw attention to stricter monitoring of the quality of subsidized flour, as well as the mechanisms of public subsidy allocations.
