With the growing concern for excessive reliance on China's role in global manufacturing, a great deal of analysis is being given to medium and long term alternatives to reduce vulnerabilities in supply chains in major sectors such as the automobile, textiles, electronics or, more worryingly, the pharmaceutical and health industries.

Other factors calling into question the primacy of global supply chains are the rising wage costs in Asia no longer offset by productivity gains, the growing utilization of robotics and AI in production, resurgent protectionism in the US and Europe, trade and tariff regimes that penalize some categories of imports, and growing concern for the environmental impact on labor and nature due to a lack of monitoring by foreign companies.

While there are several scenarios of options moving forward, Morocco is in a unique position to "up its game" by becoming a regional leader in supply chain production as it has the capacity to expand its industrial base quickly to meet demands in Europe and the US through the kinds of partnerships it already has with automobile and aeronautical manufacturers.

This would mean that companies reorganize their production systems and those of their partner suppliers, as Boeing has done in Morocco, to take advantage of the human, material, and energy resources available and accessible in Africa.

Another possible, though currently unlikely, benefit from the pandemic is extending this proposed value chain model across the Maghreb so that Tunisia and Algeria work with Morocco to become hubs of a vital supply chain for Europe and Africa, with some outreach to US markets.

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