As First Arab State to Create Ministry of Environment, Tunisia Retains Its Lead

by Richard H. Curtiss

In 1991 Tunisia became the first Arab state to create a Ministry of Environment, which grew out of an earlier government agency created in 1983. On June 5 of this year, by opening an International Center of Environmental Technologies in Tunis, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali demonstrated that he plans to keep Tunisia in the forefront in this field. The center, which has received assistance from the Swedish and German governments, is envisioned not only as a scientific research center but also as an African and southern Mediterranean training center for environmental personnel from other nations.

One of the recommendations of the 1992 World Environmental Conference in Rio de Janeiro was for nations to link national development and environment, and to guarantee citizens the right to live in a safe and clean environment. Tunisia has become a model nation in this regard. It already has incorporated environmental laws into its national development strategy, and it will be ready when its association agreement with the European Union is ratified and it is required to observe EU environmental standards in the production of all goods it exports to Europe. (For example, because India uses arsenic in the processing of leather, Indian leather products are banned from EU markets.)

Tunisia is the environmental leader in its region in many ways. It has 50 sewage treatment plants already in operation, and plans to complete another 40 by the year 2000. (By contrast, Morocco, with more than three times the population of Tunisia, has put only one sewage treatment plant into operation to date.) Already, not a drop of untreated sewage water reaches the Mediterranean in any Tunisian tourist area.

Further, the treated water that leaves Tunisian sewage plants is recycled in ways that benefit the environment. Tunisia’s many golf courses all are irrigated with such treated water, as are roadside ornamental plantings, urban parks, cotton fields and plantings of non-food crops.

Such environmental programs involve cooperation with both public health authorities and with economic development planners. For example, since Tunisia is heavily dependent on tourism as its second largest foreign exchange earner after agriculture, Tunisian planners understand that tourism requires a scrupulously clean environment. For this reason environmental program funding has received a high government priority.

To help finance what it calls “blue hand” water conservation measures in water-short Tunisia, where annual rainfall varies from about 16 inches a year in the north to no rainfall at all in the southern desert, the government has devised a unique way of billing water users. Instead of giving discounts for heavy water users, the program works the other way. Rates per gallon increase for heavy water consumers, encouraging conservation. Also added to every water bill, large or small, is a surcharge for waste water treatment, depending upon the amount of water each consumer has used.

“None of this would be possible without citizen participation,” explains Minister of Environment Mohamed Mehdi Mlika. Therefore his ministry conducts nation-wide public education campaigns involving both the media and, most important, the schools.

To make Tunisians environmentally conscious, the Ministry of Environment has developed a cartoon mascot, Labib, a long-eared desert fox, who for Tunisian children has become as synonymous with cleaning beaches, planting trees, depositing trash in containers and conserving water and electricity as Smokey the Bear has become synonymous with forest fire prevention in the United States.

Supplementing its “blue hand” programs, Tunisia’s Ministry of environment has “yellow hand” programs aimed at halting and reversing desertification. Situated on the fringes of the Sahara, Tunisia faces the problem of desert sands from the south constantly encroaching into the arable steppeland in the country’s center. Anti-desertification efforts involve planting windbreaks, stabilizing sand dunes, and draining lands that have become saline through overuse or misuse to make them arable again.

The efforts that involve the most people however, are the “green hand” programs for protection of Tunisian areas that have some rainfall but have become deforested through overuse. Schoolchildren and boy scouts turn out for Arbor Day tree-planting exercises all over the country, and the Tunisian government leads the way by planting tens of thousands of trees in areas that have been stripped by overgrazing and foraging for fuel. To reduce the demand for wood fuel, the Tunisian government has made alternate means of cooking available in rural areas ranging from kerosene stoves to solar ovens, which work well in Tunisia’s almost perpetual sunshine.

As part of its “green hand” activities, the Tunisian government also has created a number of national parks to help preserve ecosystems in the mountainous north, the steppe country in central Tunisia, and the desert to the south. The best-known national park is Lake Ichkeul, north of Tunis. As one of the few protected wetlands in North Africa, it provides wintering grounds for tens of thousands of birds which summer in Europe and arctic areas. The parks also protect endangered indigenous flora and fauna ranging from deer and water birds to sea turtles.

Tunisia also pays a great deal of attention to parks and landscaping within the urban areas, where much of the population lives. At present there are five square meters of green park space per urban dweller, and the government’s goal is 10 square meters per resident.

Environmental Minister Mlika spends much of his time actually visiting schools and participating in tree-planting events to increase youth awareness of the environment. However, his ministry also is engaged in less glamorous but equally important work with Tunisian industrialists to ensure that as the country increases its activities in manufacturing and in agricultural production, the environment does not suffer.

When a particular industry has environmental problems, it can consult with the ministry to define the nature of the concern and work out agreed solutions. To implement remedial plans approved by the ministry, the industry is expected to provide 30 percent of the required financing, and the Ministry of Environment provides 20 percent from a government environmental fund. The remaining 50 percent is raised from bank credits made available at lower-than-market interest rates. In this manner Tunisian industry is held responsible for solving its own environmental problems, but with both technological and financial support from the Ministry of Environment.

For a country which obtained its independence only 40 years ago, and which was considered a “developing country” during its early years of independence, Tunisia already has met a surprising percentage of its environmental needs. In urban areas more than 80 percent of the population already is linked to sewage treatment networks. Serving those same urban areas are 29 landfills. Now Tunisian municipalities are working on the same problems American municipalities face in improving collection of solid waste, and increasing the percentage of such wastes that are recycled.

Tunisians are proud of their pioneering role in environmental protection, and Ministry of Environment officials are determined to use their newly opened scientific and technological center to test and develop new protection strategies applicable not only to their own relatively arid environment, but also to similar environments around the world. While most Middle Eastern countries look upon environmental protection as a necessary but costly drain on the national budget, the Tunisians have progressed beyond that stage.

They are pioneering in devising ways to levy the cost of environmental protection fairly and efficiently on the users of environmental resources. Further, in their laboratories and field experiments they are developing environmental technology for export, giving new meaning to the time-honored maxim that necessity is the mother of invention.