Peter Foster
speaker
30 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Jun
Peter Foster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And that leaves the UK, a small medium sized country, to be piggy in the middle, not part of a big block, increasingly squeezed, increasingly finding it difficult to keep all sides happy.
And I think what it says is that coming down the tracks increasingly are difficult choices that risk upsetting one or other of those parties.
My pleasure.
There is nervousness in Brussels and certainly a desire to send a signal that they don't want Morocco and indeed other North African countries, Egypt, Algeria, to become proxy surrogates for Chinese dumping.
Well, two things.
One is that Morocco has seen a massive uptick in investment from China, about $6 billion over the last three years.
The second issue is that Morocco has a trade deal with the European Union, and therefore things that are made in Morocco can enter the European Union without paying a tariff.
Now, in the case of an automobile or automobile parts, very often the EU has tariffs on those goods that are coming direct from China.
And so the worry is that Morocco might be becoming a backdoor where stuff from China goes into factories in Morocco, gets to some degree made into something else, and then shipped on tariff-free into the EU.
And it's more about the potential scale of this, given the scale of the Chinese investment, I think, that is unsettling officials in Brussels.
So I went to an investment conference in Casablanca where nearly 100 Chinese companies were listening to the pitch from the Moroccan government about why they should come and invest in Morocco.
There are tax breaks.
There is plentiful labor, green energy, and, of course, access to those trade deals that I just mentioned.
So Moroccan business groups, they're getting delegations two to three a week
Now, what does that translate into?
Well, we went out about 25 miles south of Tangier, the big port city, where rising out of these scrubby hills is a new industrial park, where a lot of these Chinese companies are building factories, both to create parts that are going to be shipped into the European automobile supply chains, but also parts that could go to the two European car makers there.
Renault, the French maker, and Stellantis that owns Peugeot and other brands that have factories in Morocco.
first thing they can do is they can impose quotas and actually put up what they call anti-dumping duties.
And indeed, they did that on a case that was settled last year on aluminium wheels.
And they said that these aluminium wheels were being subsidised both by the Moroccans unfairly and by the Chinese through this thing called the Belt and Road Initiative, which is
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