The head of the seawater desalination plant project in the coastal Tunisian city of Sousse has said that the facility entered its trial phase at a time when the region and the country are facing a severe water shortage that has sparked protests. Moncef Ammar, the project director, told Tunisia’s state-run National Radio that the plant is now 100 percent complete and is currently undergoing testing. The plant has a production capacity of 50,000 cubic meters per day, with the possibility of expansion to reach 100,000 cubic meters per day. Once officially operational, the facility, which is primarily intended to serve the regions of Sousse, Monastir, and Mahdia, is expected to provide an additional water supply equivalent to about 25 percent of peak consumption levels, according to the official. Several regions in Tunisia, particularly the Monastir governorate, have been suffering from frequent interruptions in drinking water supplies that last for several hours. These disruptions are caused either by water scarcity or by weak water flow resulting from network failures and delayed maintenance operations. The outages have led to rising prices for bottled water, an increase in hoarding and profiteering, and angry protests in several cities. Ammar said that the Tunisian state has pursued non-traditional water resources and turned to seawater desalination, considering it a necessity rather than an option in light of growing water scarcity, despite its high cost. In April, the World Bank approved financing for two projects under Tunisia’s “Water Security and Resilience Program.” The country has been suffering from water shortages due to repeated drought seasons and the effects of climate change. The projects have a total cost of $332.5 million, of which $208.5 million is allocated to sustainably improve drinking water services for around 2.3 million Tunisians. Lack of water has caused agricultural output to decline over recent years and production costs to rise, threatening the viability of certain crops that require large quantities of water. To secure the future of Tunisian agriculture and strengthen the resilience of rural areas against mounting environmental challenges, there is an increasing need to expand irrigation technologies, preserve drought-adapted seeds, and establish more sustainable management of water resources. Tunisia began using desalination technology in 1995 with the construction of a groundwater desalination plant in Gabès, following a modest pilot project on the island of Kerkennah in 1983. The country’s most significant achievement came when the Djerba desalination plant began production in May 2018 at a cost of nearly 200 million Tunisian dinars. After decades of reluctance to expand desalination projects because of high investment costs and the expense of producing desalinated water, Tunisia’s National Water Distribution and Exploitation Company stated that turning to desalination is now “the only solution to secure new water resources.”
