How the EU growing fertilisers market is drying up Southern Tunisia.

Phosphate rocks are the main source of phosphorus - a finite, fundamental element, largely employed in fertilisers production. Ninety percent of phosphate rocks on earth are located in just a handful of countries, among them Tunisia.

The European Commission recently included phosphate in its list of critical raw materials - essential to the future production of goods and services in the EU. With the demand (and the price) on the export market steadily increasing, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied announced in Summer 2023 an initiative to prioritise phosphate production, which already accounts for 15% of the exports - in a country in the throes of a financial and economic crisis.

But phosphate extraction comes at a high price. In the Gafsa basin, where Tunisian phosphates come from, farmers lack water for their fields, as this scarce resource is diverted to mines. Herders lose camels and sheep due to contaminated water that pollutes the rivers. Respiratory diseases and cancer rate in the area are higher than elsewhere in Tunisia, as local communities breathe phosphate’s dust from the nearby deposits and mines.

Mining in Gafsa started at the end of the 19th century, under French colonialism. A century later, the exploitation and depletion of a land that would otherwise be one of the richest in Tunisia, continues in ways that are different only on the surface