T unisia
The people of Jemna, a region
in southern Tunisia famous for its
excellent quality dates call-
ed DegletNour (the dates of light),
have been engaged in an inspiring
struggle for land.
The peasants of Jemna were
forcefully dispossessed of their
land in 1912 by French colonists
who exploited it to export an original
product (dates) to France. The
self-employed people of Jemna
were reduced to landless peasants
and thrown into poverty.
When Tunisia gained indepen-
dence in 1956, instead of returning
the land to its original and histo-
rically legitimate owners as well as
distributing it to landless peasants,
the ruling elite nationalised the
land, created a public sector firm
and pursued a colonial model of
intensive, mechanised agriculture
at the expense of a traditional one.
Land was rented to some farmers
and an attempt was made to create
a system of agricultural coopera-
tives but that was made to be failed.
In other cases, land was just sold
and given away to people close to
decision-makers.
This was felt as an injustice by
many peasants in Tunisia, including
in Jemna. Independence did not
result in an amelioration of their
plight, but rather a new form of
dispossession, this time at the
hands of the state. Their status as
landless peasants has been
perpetuated in the post-colonial
period.
With the liberalisation of the
agricultural sector, especially in the
1980s (with IMF structural adjust-
ment programmes), the public
sector company that was managing
the oasis of Jemna went bankrupt
in 2002. This opened the door to
two private investors (close to the
ousted dictator Ben Ali) who
shamelessly made obscene profits
while paying derisory sums to the
state as rent costs.
May- 2017
Struggle for Land
It took a revolution and a
popular uprising to reverse this
state of affairs. The Tunisian
revolution of 2010-2011 embol-
dened the people of Jemna and
enabled their “Revolutionary
Committee” to recover the land and
expel the profiteers just two days
before Ben Ali fled the country on
14 January 2011. What ensued
was an inspiring experience of
people taking control of their
livelihoods and collectively self-
managing their lands and
resources for the benefit of the
community.
The first thing the peasants did
was to set up an organisation called
the Association for the Protection
of Jemna’s Oasis (APJO), which
took care of the agricultural
management, the investment of
revenues and the implementation
of developmental projects in the
wider community. The results have
been inspiring. Production has
doubled between 2011 and 2014
and the oasis currently employs
around three hundred workers
compared to twenty before 2011.
In five years, the APJO allocated
more than half a million pounds
(made in profit) for community
projects (compared to £40,000
rental costs collected by the state
in nine years from 2002 to 2010).
The projects included: construction
of a covered market, a sports
venue, and classrooms as well as
refurbishment of primary and
secondary schools and of the
community’s small health centre.
Profits were also used to purchase
an ambulance and a scanner.
It is not a coincidence that the
2010-2011 Tunisian uprising started
in an impoverished agricultural
region (SidiBouzid) where specu-
lative capital and agribusiness
flourished. It is also no minor detail
that the incident that set the Arab
uprisings into motion was the self-
immolation of a fruit vendor:
Mohamed Bouazizi. So Jemna is
not an isolated case and it exposes
the failure of agricultural policies
pursued by the Ben Ali govern-
ment. It brought to the fore the
persistence of the unresolved
agrarian question
Jemna is being assaulted by
the guardians of neoliberal
capitalism who have a different
vision for agriculture in liberali-
zation and agribusiness (incar-
nated in the person of the current
Prime Minister, Youssef Chahed,
who worked for the Foreign
Agricultural Service (FAS) of the
United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) and as
Agricultural Specialist at the US
Embassy in Tunis) and who do not
wish to see emancipation of
peasants that threatens their profit-
making interests. Examples of this
range from the threats directed at
the association if they dare to sell
the date harvest, the freezing of the
association’s bank accounts in
October 2016 to the ludicrous
demonising of the experience
through a subservient media that
tried to portray the people of Jemna
as criminals engaged in illegal
activities.
Agribusiness is predatory and
destructive. It reinforces land
grabbing, further deprives pea-
sants of their land and creates an
exploited class of precarious
agricultural workers. By focusing
on cash crops that need a lot of
water, Tunisia is virtually exporting
its rare water resources, exacer-
bating its water crisis. Moreover,
agribusiness is not only environ-
mentally unsustainable but it also
exploits its working force, especially
women who face terrible working
conditions, including sexual
harassment.
In Kairouan, a region in central
Tunisia, a project of agro-fuels is
contd. in page 23
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