In Tunisia’s Gafsa Valley, the desert takes on a different guise. Rather than the picturesque dunes frequented by tourists farther south, the land bears the scars of a deteriorating landscape that has been relentlessly exploited. In the late 19th century, the French military officer and geologist Philippe Thomas stumbled upon the Gafsa phosphate reserve, marking the beginning of a transformation in Tunisia’s southwest.

Within the mountain range that delineates the border between Tunisia and Algeria, phosphate rocks from the Gafsa Valley reserve—once managed by the French, today by the public Company of Gafsa Phosphates (known as the CPG in French)—account for 15 percent of Tunisian total exports and led the CPG to become “a state within a state,” as locals call it again and again.

“This black dust is everywhere,” said Abdelbaset Ben Hmida, a resident of the mining town of Redeyef. Even during the hottest days, the windows of his house remain shut. His son Mouaid has suffered from severe chronic asthma since childhood.

Medics agree that the only way to improve Mouaid’s health is to leave Gafsa for the coast, where the air is cleaner. “But I would lose my job,” Abdelbaset complained, displaying dozens of prescriptions and hospital bills from years of his son’s ineffective treatment. The nearest hospital is 45 miles away.

Under the French protectorate, miners flocked to Redeyef from Europe and neighboring countries, such as Algeria and Morocco, in search of work. Today, however, the city is witnessing a steady exodus of its youth. Every family has a relative residing in Italy or France. The governorate of Gafsa embodies a paradox: Its soil is rich in high-value-added resources—phosphates contribute approximately between 3 percent and 4 percent to the country’s GDP—yet the unemployment rate remains among the highest across Tunisia (at about 25 percent according to 2022 figures from the Office of Southern Development).

Abdelbaset works for the civil service. Quitting his job is a risk he cannot afford: Once employing a large part of the population, CPG is hiring fewer and fewer local workers due to debt, protests, and the resulting decrease in production, all while international financial institutions are requiring public wage reductions as a condition for the Tunisian government to borrow.

Historically, protests or popular revolts in Tunisia have often been linked to the food and agriculture production chain.

On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable vendor from the town of Sidi Bouzid, immolated himself after his family had been dispossessed of their land by a large agribusiness investor, leaving him with nothing but his street vendor stall. Bouazizi made a living selling fruits and vegetables at the city market, where he was targeted and harassed by local police shortly before immolating himself. His death instantly triggered a nationwide revolution. Angry and fed-up Tunisians took to the streets, many brandishing baguettes, calling for the departure of longtime ruler Zine el Abidine Ben Ali; he left the country in January 2011.

What is less known is that the prelude to the Arab Spring occurred in Gafsa, where a series of protests in 2008 erupted to demand social justice, transparent public contracts, regional development, and employment in the phosphate sector. Riots were violently suppressed by the Ben Ali regime.

“Little has changed today, but pollution has increased significantly,” said Boubakar Akremi, a well-known face of civil society in El-Borj, a few miles from Mdhilla, the town where the Tunisian Chemical Group refines phosphates and turns them into the most widely used types of fertilizers. Akremi, the son of a miner who is now employed at the Mzinda mine, a few miles from Mdhilla, was imprisoned in 2008 for organizing a sit-in at the town gates to claim his right to a job.

More than 15 years later, this dry and turbulent region is again at the core of global price wars. Countries in North Africa are among the world’s main phosphate producers, with Morocco and Egypt near the top of the global ranking. Following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, phosphate exports from Russia—another major producer, along with China—declined, causing the price to soar on the global market, where it peaked at $350 per ton in 2023.

This has opened up opportunities for Tunisia, a country in the midst of a severe financial and economic crisis, which sits on the fourth-largest phosphate reserve in the world. But that economic crisis, internal inequalities, and corruption were also the major arguments used by President Kais Saied to centralize power and dismantle democratic institutions in 2021.

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A stream of water runs through a barren landscape. Shrubs are seen on one side and what looks like bones of a dead animal are exposed on a dirt-packed embankment to the left of the stream.

A stream of water runs across Mzinda mine, carrying mud and polluted water downstream, in Mdhila, Tunisia, on Jan. 18.

While the European Union has already included phosphates in its list of critical raw materials, many other countries, including the United States, are considering doing the same. As phosphate has become a key material in the lithium-ion batteries used for electric vehicles and industrial applications, characterized by their lower toxicity and longer life cycles compared to other batteries, the extraction of the mineral was a key issue in the long negotiations on the so-called loss and damage mechanism promoted at the U.N. climate summit held in Dubai in 2023, known as COP28.

At COP28, members of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an organization that aims to set a common standard for transparency and accountability in  mining sectors, discussed the supply chains of the materials that are critical to the green energy transition.

“In 2015, the Tunisian government announced that it wanted to be part of EITI, which implies adherence to a code of conduct and greater guarantees of transparency,” noted Abir Yahyaoui, an expert with the Tunis-based Natural Resource Governance Institute, in an interview with Foreign Policy. Saied then fired his energy minister, Neila Nouira Gonji, after she made a comment about gas prices—a move “which took Tunisia back to square one,” Yahyaoui said. Gonji had been working on an alternative subsidy system to meet the criteria required for future lending by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

However, phosphate extraction comes with significant environmental costs: While fertilizers make Western fields green, phosphate mining dries up southern Tunisian soil. Farmers are left without water, as wells owned by CPG in the Gafsa Mountains divert water sources to the phosphate laundries, where the ore is washed with chemicals before being refined into fertilizer, its main use.

“We could be the country’s leading agricultural region if we didn’t export all this water,” said Sobhy, a local farmer who struggles to water his small plot of land. Like most of the sources we spoke to, he asked not to disclose his full name out of fear of retaliation.

In addition, streams of gray mud polluted from the washing process flow down from the mountains to the oases—fragile desert ecosystems predominantly used for agricultural production that are also a magnet for tourists. Lofti, a camel farmer in his early 50s, recounts how one of his animals grazed near a mud dike that was supposed to collect wastewater but overflowed, spreading freely into the wild.

“The camel ended up getting sick,” he explained.

Lofti’s case is not uncommon. The town council of El-Hamma, a small town bordering the provinces of Gafsa and Tozeur and located next to the river of mudflows, has already lodged a complaint against the CPG due to numerous complaints from livestock farmers in the area.

Meanwhile, in Redeyef, the Ben Hmida family has decided to join forces with two civil society organizations—the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) and Avocats Sans Frontières—to take their son Mouaid’s case to court.

In his office in the heart of Gafsa, their lawyer, Rostom Ben Jabra, understands the sensitivity of the case. It could potentially “prove for the first time a direct correlation between the pollution caused by phosphates and Mouaid’s state of health.”

Depending on the verdict, this case could set a powerful precedent that CPG seems unprepared for and unwilling to accept. In October 2023, the family was informed that the Gafsa Court of First Instance had dismissed the case, and they are now awaiting information about the reasons for this decision before making an appeal. But an outcome isn’t guaranteed: although the Tunisian Constitution—which was revised by Saied through a referendum in 2022—still guarantees the right to a healthy environment, the country still lacks a Constitutional Court.

While the CPG represents a curse for Ben Hmida, the triangular, blue symbol of the state-owned company also represents one of the only hopes for work in the Gafsa Valley, which is almost entirely dominated by this single company. The CPG still manages some public services directly or through subsidies, including transportation and waste management. As confirmed by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a civil society organization with one of its local offices in Redeyef, “CPG had previously provided both water and electricity services in mining areas. In the 1980s, the state-owned companies for water and electricity distribution, SONEDE and STEG, inherited the network from CPG.”

“Phosphate is our past, present, and future,” said Taoufik Aïd, a retired teacher from the workers’ school in Moularès who remains active within civil society as a member of the Network for Transparency in the Energy and Mining Industry.

After years of rocky negotiations with the IMF following a 2016 loan agreement between the organization and Tunisia, in April 2023, Saied publicly rejected the “diktats” of the IMF and other international financial institutions, which often condition unpopular reforms, such as ending state subsidies, as a term for providing new loan agreements.

Saied, who led what many consider to be a constitutional coup on July 25, 2021, has shifted his priorities ever since to focus on ramping up revenues of domestic export industries—including phosphate in particular.

“We are sitting on gold in the midst of a financial crisis, and we are not exploiting it,” he declared at a National Security Council meeting on phosphate production in April 2023, before visiting the Gafsa Valley mining basin in June.

In some areas of the Gafsa Valley, unemployed people and activists have been engaged in efforts to block phosphate production sites since the 2008 revolt, fueling a narrative in better-off coastal Tunisia that blames such activism for causing the country’s economic woes as Tunisia has slipped from 5th to 11th place among global phosphate producers over the past decade.

The Redeyef laundry site, for instance, has been effectively shut down since 2021 due to a sit-in by unemployed citizens demanding jobs. This blockade paradoxically has contributed to the air pollution in the sleepy mining town, as a massive open-air stock of phosphates has been sitting in the town’s center ever since.

Among the unemployed youths, some get by via working in the black market of smuggled goods from neighboring Algeria, while others, such as 30-year-old Mohamed, dream of Europe.

A person dressed in all brown walks through a dry, rocky area near the Kef Eddour mine in Tunisia. There are several long brown buildings in the distance, as well as tan and brown flat-topped hills looming in the background behind that.

The Kef Eddour mine, in Metlaoui, Tunisia, which opened in 1985, is one of the biggest open-air phosphate mines in the Gafsa mining basin.

Turned back twice by the coast guard while trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa, this self-taught geologist and passionate admirer of the Gafsa Mountains sits in front of the entrance of an abandoned underground mine and agrees: “The richness of the soil is what we have left.”