TUNIS, Tunisia—Struggling with extremism and economic woes, Tunisia now faces another menace: persistent drought across several regions that is creating new social tensions and threatening farming, a pillar of the economy.
Farmland is too parched to cultivate crops and rural protesters have tried disrupting water supplies to the capital, while one legislator is calling for a “thirst revolt.”
A lack of rain, combined with years of bad resource management, has left reservoirs and dams at exceptionally low levels that could lead to a “catastrophic situation,” said Saad Seddik, who was agriculture minister until last month.
With municipal water supplies periodically cut off, residents of some towns are walking several kilometers (miles) to fetch water from public fountains, loading up donkeys with water canisters—if there’s any left.
“We come here twice a day, first early in the morning before the dam becomes agitated and dangerous. But what we fetch in the morning isn’t enough. So we repeat the trip in the afternoon,” but it’s still not enough to clean the house or wash clothes, said Hadiya Farhani from the town of Sbikha in the central Kairouan region.
Fellow resident Samir Farhani says the government is concentrating on fighting terrorism “while forgetting that thirst could make us turn into terrorists.” Tunisia suffered two major Islamic extremist attacks last year targeting tourists and sees sporadic violence and threats from the Islamic State group in Libya and other radical groups in the region.
“We are thirsty. Give us water, we don’t need work, just water,” he pleaded.
