Farmers: Social protection on track
On Wednesday, the spot-light was on the ministry of Agriculture who organized a seminar on strengthening the com-pulsory medical insurance (AMO) implementation mechanism and on the establishment of the National Agricultural Registry (RNA). But in reality, this is a pretext to speed up the implementation of the generali-zation of social protection in favor of farmers, who number 1.6 million people. This resulted in the signing of four partnership agreements for the exchange of information and data, one with the Crédit Agricole du Maroc group, the second one with the National Land Conservation Agency, and a third one with the social secu-rity agency (CNSS), this latter having also signed an agreement with the Crédit Agricole group. To support this project, Crédit Agri-cole will launch a communication campaign to make farmers aware of the need to sign up for this new strategic product. Moreover, Crédit Agricole has undertaken to help the line ministry and the CNSS to deploy this system, particularly on the cru-cial issue of the financial relationship between the beneficiary and CNSS. A relationship based on the payment of the contribution and the service, “which requires a financial interme-diary who must be able to provide ad-ditional services that go hand in hand with this service”, underlined the boss of this Bank. It is in this capacity that the two institutions will exchange information and files. Crédit Agricole will make available 720,000 customers who are account holders. To this figure, it will be necessary to add the 150,000 to 200,000 accounts of Ardi and Fellah. This is an essential point that will save time in the rollout of this system. For most customers, Crédit Agricole will offer a product that allows them to deduct the contribution for the CNSS. In this operation, the bank wishes to create two accounts for farmers, one, Al Ard, is a profes-sional account and another account, Dar, is a personal account which will be used to receive the benefits related to the medical services. These will be two separate accounts and the Bank will not be able to make withdrawals from the Dar account. In this major project, an important element comes into play, namely the draft law creating the National Agricultural Registry (RNA) which establishes a new major stage in the management and governance of the sector, in particular the acceleration of social protection for farmers. The RNA consists of a comprehensive census of operators and agricultural holdings at the national level, with their geographical location. This sys-tem will also be used to provide data on agricultural development programs and information facilitating access to health coverage and to social protec-tion for farmers.
Mohamed CHAOUI
