Power Cuts Leave Tunisia’s Farms in Ruin

On a poultry farm just outside Tunisia’s capital, a backhoe gathers hundreds of chicken carcasses to bury them in a pit. The situation is not unique to this farm in El-Fahs, about 60 kilometers from Tunis, as recent power cuts have sown devastation across thecountry.

With summer temperatures soaring and the need for air conditioning rising in parallel, the national electricity company STEG has resorted to load shedding - rolling blackouts to reduce the strain on the power grid when demand exceeds production capacity.

The bill for the dead poultry in El-Fahs is “huge... between 1.4 and 1.5 million dinars” ($500,000), estimates veterinarian Hamza Bouchrit. Without ventilation or water, nearly 90 percent of the birds died, the equivalent of “400 to 500 tons of meat” lost, he told AFP. 

On site, a putrid smell still hangs in the air. STEG has said that load shedding was unavoidable to prevent a “blackout”. Blackouts have sometimes lasted hours and came at unpredictable times, though outages seem to have decreased since this weekend.

With the power cut on the poultry farm, the ventilation system stopped. The water, supplied by electric pumps, also stopped flowing. The birds did not survive.

The site did have a generator, but it “is only used for emergencies” and is not designed to run for more than two or three hours,Bouchrit said.

“Since the outage lasted longer, the generator overheated and stopped working. And then came the catastrophe,” he said. On a neighboring dairy farm, Aziz Bouhejba, who raises about 50 Holstein cows, said he had to throw away six days worth of milking—around 1,200 litersof milk.