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Rabat – Following both France’s decision to cut by 50% the number of visas granted to Moroccans and the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) decision to invalidate the Morocco-EU fisheries and agriculture agreements, many in Morocco are calling to boycott French products.
Several Moroccans on social media groups slammed French’s recent decision to halve the number of visas France’s consular services have annually issued to Moroccan citizens in recent years.
Moroccan activists widely circulated the hashtag #BoycottFrenshProducts on Facebook in response to the decision. “To all Moroccans, it is necessary to boycott all French products. As long as it is not the visa for Mecca, I boycott France and all its products,” reads one of the comments on Facebook.
On September 28, France decided to reduce the number of visas granted to citizens from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.
In a statement, the French government justified its move by citing the “refusal” of the three North African countries to cooperate with French authorities on the repatriation of their citizens living in France with no legal status.
The following day, the ECJ decided to “annul” the fisheries and agriculture agreements between Morocco and the EU.
It is not the first time that Moroccans have called to boycott French products.
Last year, the hashtag #BoycottFrenchProducts went viral on different social media platforms following the publication of offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on the walls of many buildings in France.
To protest the repeated insults against Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, many Arab countries joined the boycott.
At that time, France’s Minister of Trade, Franck Riester, said that his country “does not fear a boycott campaign from Morocco.”
However, as the campaign grew stronger and spread to other Muslim countries, French President Emmanuel Macron retracted on his government’s position on the caricatures of the Prophet.
Saying he understood and supported Muslims’ anger, the French president urged the Muslim world not to boycott his country based on what he described as the media’s exaggeration and mischaracterization of his government’s position on “Islamist separatism.”
In 2019, France’s exports to Morocco were estimated at more than $5.34 billion, according to UN Comtrade. In the Muslim-majority world, only Turkey and Algeria purchased more imports than Morocco.
In April 2018, Moroccans boycotted Central Danone, a French company, because of its unreasonably high prices. As a result, the company registered a net loss of MAD 538 million.
