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For decades, governments in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya have clung to a simple formula for stability: Keep bread affordable at any cost. In the post-independence decades, regimes poured oil revenues and public funds into massive subsidies, fixing the price of flatbread and flour at mere cents. This “bread-for-quiet” social contract became a pillar of political governance.
In Algiers, a baguette still costs about $0.10 thanks to heavy state subsidies — a ruinous legacy of leaders who understood that hungry citizens could quickly become angry citizens. The strategy succeeded in the short term. Even during wars and uprisings elsewhere, North African populations were mostly insulated from outright famine or food riots. The region’s rulers ensured supermarket shelves stayed stocked and staple foods remained within reach. But that apparent success masked a deeper failure to build anything resembling resilient food governance systems.
Authoritarian and centralized governance structures have maintained food access on paper, but often by brute force of spending rather than sound planning. Through the 1970s and 1980s, many North African states devoted around 5-6 percent of gross domestic product to food and fuel subsidies — a huge fiscal burden justified as the cost of social peace. Dissent was managed through cheap calories instead of democratic voice.
Yet, this top-down approach bred complacency and neglect. As regimes fixated on urban consumers and import supply chains, they paid scant attention to rural development. Small farmers were left to toil with aging irrigation canals and little support, and agricultural innovation stagnated. In Tunisia, decades of urban-first policies drove many youth away from farming; today nearly half of Tunisian farm laborers are over the age of 60, a grim indicator of a graying countryside.
Similar trends are visible in Algeria and Morocco, where younger generations see no future in tilling the soil. The implicit deal — autocratic governments providing food security in exchange for political quiescence — has proven hollow in the long run. The fields are full, but the farms are failing.
North Africa’s addiction to imported food is an open secret and a dangerous Achilles’ heel. More than half of the calories consumed across the Maghreb come from beyond the region’s borders. Wheat from France, sunflower oil from Ukraine, sugar from Brazil — the daily meals of Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, and Libyans are entwined with global supply chains and volatile commodity markets.
This dependence hardly mattered when world prices were low and foreign exchange was plentiful. But those conditions are vanishing. When drought and geopolitics upended grain markets in 2022 North African governments were forced to dig deep into their coffers. That year, Morocco’s worst harvest in decades caused its cereal output to plummet by over 60 percent, and the entire region had to import an estimated 51 million tons of cereals to make up the shortfall.
North African countries have talked up grand schemes but progress is slow.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
Even oil-rich Algeria felt the squeeze. Algeria consumes roughly 11 million tons of wheat a year, but grows only a quarter of that on its own soil. The rest must be purchased abroad, its cost covered by fickle oil and gas revenues. As energy prices fluctuate and Algeria’s currency weakens, it hampers the government’s ability to absorb the cost of bread for 45 million. With each dinar devaluation, imported wheat becomes pricier and the subsidy bill swells. These fiscal cracks put regimes in a bind: do they dip into dwindling foreign reserves to uphold the social contract of cheap food, or do they risk an uprising by letting prices rise?
Underlying this fragility is a deeper environmental and generational crisis in North African agriculture. The region’s farmlands are literally drying up. North Africa is one of the driest areas on Earth, and climate change is hitting it with a sledgehammer. Year after year, temperatures break records and rainfall grows more erratic. By last summer, reservoirs in parts of Tunisia fell to less than one-fifth of their capacity, forcing authorities to start rationing water to households overnight.
Morocco and Algeria have faced successive droughts that turned once-fertile plains into dust bowls. In Morocco’s once-lush Middle Atlas region, farmers watch as shrinking snowpacks and erratic rains decimate their harvests; the country’s ambitious irrigation projects and “Green Morocco” agricultural plan have struggled to keep pace with the sheer scale of water scarcity. Poor water management has compounded the pain — decades of over-extraction from aquifers, inefficient irrigation, and neglect of water infrastructure mean that precious winter rain often evaporates unused. Now climate models project yet another brutally hot year ahead, raising fears of a new cycle of crop failures.
This ecological stress intersects with a demographic time-bomb on the farms. Because government policies historically devalued farming as a livelihood, young people in Algeria, Tunisia, and beyond have steadily abandoned rural life for the cities, the civil sector or going abroad. Those who remain tilling the land are aging fast. The sight of a 70-year-old farmer working alone in his field is no longer unusual.
In Tunisia, the median age of farmers has drifted upward into the senior years, leaving fewer energetic hands to adapt to climate challenges or adopt new techniques. When the old farmers age out, who will replace them? The danger is that local food production capacity simply withers away through attrition, even as climate change makes it ever harder to grow crops.
Meanwhile, North African countries have talked up grand schemes — Algeria speaks of “greening” the Sahara with new farms, Morocco experiments with drought-tolerant grain varieties, but progress is slow and often superficial. The hard truth is that it is easier for leaders to import shiploads of wheat than to undertake the politically thankless work of overhauling irrigation systems, land policies, and rural investment.
But that easy path is now leading to a dead end, and the signs of strain are everywhere. The politics of food in North Africa is fast approaching a dangerous precipice. The old bargain of authoritarian stability in exchange for guaranteed bread is unraveling under the weight of climate change and economic reality.
If governments in Algiers, Rabat, Tunis, and Tripoli cannot pivot from emergency measures to genuine reform, they risk a future where they can no longer afford to feed their people who, in turn, can no longer afford to wait. The cost of failure will be measured not just in import bills or inflation percentages, but in upheaval on the streets and empty villages left behind. In a region where bread has always been political, it may soon become the very currency of survival — or revolt.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
X: @HafedAlGhwell