Rebecca L. Gruskin

“Extracting Tunisia” tells the story of how modern agriculture was forged in rural Tunisia’s Gafsa region. A French colonial company mined Gafsa’s mountains for the nutrients plants require, exported this rock for European factories to chemically transform into fertilizer, and enabled farmers to scatter this processed Tunisian land over European fields in ever-increasing quantities. By focusing on the Tunisian phosphate mines that fed Europe’s rapacious fertilizer consumption throughout the twentieth century, “Extracting Tunisia” shows how this system of nutrient extraction developed not to feed the world but to nourish the interests of capital and empire. Tunisian mineworkers and small farmers built movements for environmental and social justice that ended formal empire and laid the groundwork for the “Arab Spring,” yet the extractive systems they protested endure to this day. A sustainable food system requires not a technological fix but attending to their demands for justice.