A severe drought in North Africa has Tunisian farmers bracing for a catastrophically poor harvest, threatening food security in the cash-strapped country. At a time when the global grain market has been disrupted by the war in Ukraine, Tunisia\u2019s domestic grain production has also dried up as a lack of rainfall has killed the crop. Even before the baking summer months, the soil in the small Mediterranean country, whose water resources are steadily depleting as climate change intensifies, is parched and dusty. \u201cWe have never seen such a bad drought,\u201d said wheat farmer Tahar Chaouachi, walking dejectedly through his field, 55 kilometers (35 miles) inland from the capital Tunis. \u201cThe last four years have been dry, but this season we expected rain. Instead, it has gotten worse.\u201d With some of Tunisia\u2019s water reservoirs almost completely dry, authorities last month imposed emergency measures that allocate supplies to households and ban the use of water for washing cars as well as for irrigating fields. \u201cProduction is at zero,\u201d said Chaouachi, whose farmland is in Beja province, a key grain-producing region since the Roman Empire. \u201cThe situation is unsustainable. We are losing everything we spend on seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and wages,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is no telling where things are going.\u201d The shortage comes at a critical time for Tunisia, a net wheat importer that has been hit hard by rising prices since Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A severe drought in North Africa has left Tunisian farmers bracing for a catastrophically poor harvest, threatening food security in the cash-strapped country. At a time when the global grain market has been disrupted by the war in Ukraine, Tunisia\u2019s domestic grain production has also dried up due to a lack of rainfall that has killed the crop. Even before the summer baking months [\u2026]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klimaticka-zmena"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}