The Politics of Scarcity

Tunisia has a Mediterranean climate with a long dry season and an increasingly unreliable wet one. Droughts have grown longer, and demand from farming, tourism and cities has risen.

Farmers use most of the water and, in many crops, produce the least value for each cubic metre. Drinking water is given priority in law, but a priority written on paper does not fill a pipe, and in rural areas supply is intermittent and connection rates are lower than on the coast. Households there buy from private tankers, often at several times the public price.

The quietest problem is groundwater. When surface water runs short, farmers drill deeper. Unlicensed boreholes are hard to find and politically difficult to close. Along the coast, pumping too much from an aquifer pulls in seawater, and once salt enters, the water is lost for everyone.

Energy is bound up in all of this. Desalination and pumping use a lot of electricity, and Tunisia's share of renewables remains in the low single figures against a target of 30 per cent by 2030. A country that must desalinate with costly imported fuel, while leaving its own sun and wind largely unused, pays twice.

Waste closes the circle. Landfill siting has repeatedly failed, most visibly in Sfax, where collection broke down and rubbish piled in the streets. Towns cannot pay the full cost of collection, and the national agency cannot build facilities that local people refuse.

Water rationing costs time before it costs money.

A household with a tank fills it when supply comes and rations it afterwards. Cooking, washing and cleaning are scheduled around the hours the utility announces. When the tank empties, the household buys from a tanker and pays several times the piped price for the same water.

The burden falls unevenly. Women carry most of the work of managing household water. Families without storage or income to buy supplementary supply are the most exposed. And rural households wait longest for networks, while their farming neighbours face restrictions that city residents never see.

Refuse collection is the same story in another form. Where collection stops, the effects concentrate in dense neighbourhoods with the least space to store waste, and in low-lying areas where runoff and leachate collect.

Energy delays are felt at a distance, as a cost on a bill and as pressure on a national budget that could otherwise fund the water networks.

The contributor's account of Sfax, Djerba and the rural interior is testimony and is treated as such. The national figures used here come from published statistics and are cited separately.

Living with too little water changes how people think, in ways that are often read as resignation.

The first change is attention. Research on scarcity finds that coping with an insufficient resource uses up mental capacity. A household managing an intermittent supply is not indifferent to conservation; it is occupied by the logistics of the next delivery.

The second is a sense of control. When supply depends on a utility, a ministry and a tanker driver, an individual's efforts to save water have no visible effect. Studies of behaviour consistently find that people act when they believe their action matters. Advice to save water, given to a household using a fraction of what the network loses and the farms abstract, can be heard as an accusation.

The third is trust. Rationing is run by institutions whose competence becomes visible exactly when things go wrong. A quota announced with no explanation, or a collection service that stops for months, changes confidence sharply rather than gradually.

The fourth is fairness. Research on regulation finds that people accept unwelcome restrictions far more readily when they believe the process was fair and the reasoning explained. The same quota, explained as an allocation with stated criteria, is received differently from a directive.

The contributor's description of institutional bottlenecks is a hypothesis about administration, not a survey of public opinion, and it should be tested rather than assumed.

Start with who gets water. Tunisia gives drinking water priority in law, but access depends on a connection, a tank and money. Households buying from tankers pay many times the piped tariff, so the worst-served customers pay the most per litre. That pattern is common across the region and it is regressive by construction.

Then look at waste. When communities near proposed landfills have objected, the objection has been treated as a local obstacle to a provincial need, rather than as evidence that the siting process lacked negotiation, compensation and credible safeguards. The result is a system that cannot place its own infrastructure.

Inland and rural regions carry a third burden. Their water and grid service lags the coast, even though their farms supply much of the country's food.

Future generations appear twice. Over-pumping coastal aquifers lets salt in, which destroys the resource for everyone who comes after. And choosing energy-intensive desalination commits future budgets to a fixed running cost.

Energy fairness closes the loop. A country with strong sun and weak renewable generation is effectively importing the power it could make, and households pay for that through tariffs and the state pays through subsidies.

Authority is split by design. Water belongs to the ministry of agriculture, a national supply utility and regional commissariats. Energy belongs to a separate ministry and a state utility that runs the grid and also generates power. Waste belongs to a national agency, governorates and municipalities with separate budgets.

The results follow predictably. Water policy cannot require energy policy to act, so desalination is approved without matching renewable capacity. Waste policy cannot make towns pay, so facilities run below capacity. Renewable policy cannot force a grid connection, so authorised projects wait.

Real progress has been made: metering and tariff reform, new desalination capacity, a legal route for private renewables, and a national agency with a coherent plan.

What is missing is one body responsible for all three, a published method for deciding who gets water, an agreed process for siting facilities with negotiated compensation, and a binding schedule for renewables. None of that requires new water. Each requires a decision about who decides.