"Tunisian farmers pay the price for Europe’s attempts at energy transition"

Attempts to invest in green energy projects in Tunisia are harming domestic agricultural activities and risk making food insecurity and hydric stress in the country worse, rights groups said on Thursday.

Like many other North African countries, Tunisia has been trying to attract co-operation from Europe and around the world to harness its climate to produce renewable green energy, including solar and wind power.

In 2022, the European Commission approved plans to construct an underwater power line to transport clean energy from Tunisia to Italy...

Experts and environmental activists in Tunisia have raised several questions about the fairness of the deal and warned that a green transition in the proposed format might exhaust the country’s natural resources and put living conditions at risk for future generations.

“The question is not about the outcome [of green energy production] but how we will be reaching the possibility of taking advantage of it without harming the local population,” the Working Group for Energy Democracy said in Tunis...

Tunisian officials have been changing the legal nature of agricultural lands to forest lands to allow its exploitation by foreign private investors for the production of green energy...

The change mainly affected lands known as “common-ownership lands” in the Tunisian south, which operates under a system that has been in place for decades and maintained homogeneity in the local communities that could commonly take advantage of it for farming activities, the main source of income in most of these regions.

The state began to place some of the lands under government ownership without providing alternatives for farmers...

With green energy investment becoming more tempting for other countries, authorities took over more lands in the south as well as the north-east, offering loose contracts to previous owners, which gave them little in the way of compensation while granting foreign investors the right to use those lands for periods of up to 30 years.

“These contracts lack transparency ... in [the town of] Chenini in Tataouine, farmers were compelled to sign agreements that would allow foreign companies to take advantage of their lands for a period of four years for green energy production,”...

Farmers were offered only 1,200 Tunisian dinars ($383) a year for their lands, each of which occupy a space of at least 500 hectares, with the possibility of automatic contract renewal every year.

Farmers are also unable to pursue their agricultural activities during the span of the contract period.

Another risk of green energy production projects, say critics, is the exhaustion of water resources that are already in short supply in Tunisia...