Morocco’s Delassus Group became a certified B Corporation in June 2026 to start a “new phase” for the tomato and citrus producer, but according to deputy general director Fatiha Charrat, this is just the beginning.
Fatiha, is the climate increasingly becoming a challenge for growers in Morocco? What steps are being taken to build resilience?
Fatiha Charrat: Climate change is no longer something Moroccan agriculture discusses in the future tense. We are dealing with greater variability today: prolonged drought, changing rainfall patterns, heat and increasing pressure on water resources.
The response therefore has to happen at several levels. Nationally, Morocco is investing heavily in desalination, inter-basin water transfers, dams, treated wastewater reuse and more efficient irrigation. Morocco’s National Drinking Water Supply and Irrigation Programme (PNAEPI) is a major part of that effort. The budget for 2020–2027 has been expanded to MAD143bn (around €13bn) in response to increasing water stress.
At grower level, resilience means becoming much more precise about how every cubic metre of water is used. At Delassus, water management, energy efficiency, biodiversity and the selection of appropriate varieties are increasingly interconnected. We have long used drip irrigation and invested in renewable energy for irrigation, and we continue to work on improving productivity per unit of water rather than simply looking at yield per hectare.
For me, this is probably the biggest transformation agriculture has to make: water has to be treated as a highly strategic resource.
What’s changed at Delassus since becoming a B Corp company?
FC: Delassus Group became a certified B Corporation in June 2026, which we see as the beginning of a new phase. The process forced us to look at the company as a whole (governance, people, communities, customers and the environment) and to formalise and measure many things that we had already been working on for years. It has created a common language across very different businesses in the group and has made us formalise practices that were sometimes embedded in the culture but insufficiently documented. It also brings governance, environmental performance and social impact into the same conversation.
It has changed our conversations with customers too. They are no longer only about quality, service and price. Increasingly, customers want to understand how we treat people, how we manage water, how we reduce our environmental footprint and how the company is governed. On the social side, it has reinforced our work around living wages, working conditions and the communities in which our employees live. For example, some of our initiatives include access to safe drinking water, educational support for workers’ children and preschool infrastructure.
There are 10,500 certified companies across the world and only four in Morocco. For me B Corp is really a framework for continuous improvement. Certification is the starting line, not the finishing line.
Does the speed of change that we’re seeing with the climate influence Delassus’s sustainability goals?
FC: What is changing is the sense of urgency. But there is also a danger in simply announcing increasingly ambitious targets without having the operational capacity behind them. Agriculture is a long-term activity. You cannot change an orchard, an irrigation system, an energy infrastructure or a production region overnight.
So our approach is to accelerate where acceleration produces genuine impact, while making sure that the commitments we make are achievable and measurable.
One important development concerns logistics. MFB, the company managing Delassus Group’s transport operations, is leading the transition towards electric road transport. It is currently working on the introduction of long-range electric trucks, with the ambition to progressively replace part of our diesel fleet from 2027/28. This transition is becoming increasingly realistic with the development of Morocco’s electric mobility ecosystem, including Gotion High-Tech’s new battery gigafactory in Kenitra, in the northwest of the country.
What other challenges are you facing? Has the Middle East crisis had an impact?
FC: Geopolitical instability has certainly made global logistics more volatile. The direct impact on our UK and continental European flows is more limited than it would be for a business dependent on the Suez Canal, because Morocco is geographically very close to Europe. But we are part of a global logistics system, so disruption elsewhere can still affect vessel and container availability, fuel costs, insurance and overall freight pricing.
What about labour? Are rising costs an issue?
FC: Yes, labour costs are increasing. Morocco increased the statutory agricultural minimum wage by another 5 per cent from April 2026, as part of the national social dialogue. But I would not reduce the labour question simply to cost. The bigger challenge is labour availability. The rapid development of Morocco’s export agriculture, particularly berries and other labour-intensive crops, has created strong competition for agricultural workers.
This pressure reaches its peak between December and March, when several export crops are harvesting at the same time. Attracting and retaining workers during this period has therefore become a major operational challenge, pushing wages and other employment-related costs upwards.
