On the International Day of Peasant Struggles, rural communities across Tunisia mobilized in defense of their land, livelihoods, and dignity. Organized by the Million Rural Women and the Landless (MRWL), a series of actions unfolded in Borj Toumi, Zaghouan, Bizerte, Jbeniana, and Gabès. These mobilizations stood not only as expressions of solidarity with Palestinian peasants but also as acts of resistance against a shared system of structural marginalization. The actions followed a high-profile conference held on April 19, led by Professor Abdallah Ben Saad, a veteran scholar and activist in higher agricultural education. This gathering brought together Tunisian peasants, researchers, and land justice advocates to discuss the agricultural realities in Palestine under Israeli settler colonialism, while drawing powerful connections to the historical and contemporary struggles of Tunisia’s rural population.
This collective momentum underscores a broader transnational narrative, one in which peasants are not merely producers of food, but defenders of sovereignty and agents of political transformation. Their resistance, whether against military occupation or economic liberalization, reveals the frontline role of rural communities in confronting the global system of land dispossession and capitalist exploitation.
Colonial Continuities and Neoliberal Transformations
The structural crisis in Tunisia’s rural sector is not a spontaneous outcome of underdevelopment, but the legacy of a long trajectory of colonial dispossession and its reconfiguration under neoliberal globalization. As early as 1926, Benito Mussolini declared: “We need air to breathe, land to expand, coal and oil to warm ourselves and our machines, horizons and seas for heroism and poetry.” This imperial vision, which reduced land to a resource for conquest, has mutated into today’s global development regime, where structural adjustment, trade liberalization, and conditional aid continue to serve the interests of capital over communities .
Tunisia’s engagement with this model accelerated in the post-independence period, especially with the 1995 EU-Tunisia Association Agreement. This agreement committed Tunisia to liberalize its agricultural trade and harmonize its regulations with EU standards. It subordinated local food systems to international trade imperatives, stripping the state of the tools necessary to protect smallholder farmers from volatility and competition. These dynamics were compounded by Tunisia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the same year, and by its later negotiations with the European Union over the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA), which seeks to remove remaining tariff protections and subordinate Tunisian law to European trade frameworks .
This liberal economic shift has deepened inequalities. Public cooperatives have been dismantled. Agricultural infrastructure has deteriorated. State investment has declined sharply. Export-led monocultures such as strawberries and citrus have displaced diversified local food systems, increasing vulnerability to drought, desertification, and food insecurity .
From “Green Tunisia” to Rural Collapse: A Manufactured Agrarian Crisis
Once known as “Green Tunisia,” the country’s image as a lush and agriculturally productive nation now stands in stark contrast to the lived realities of its rural population. Industrial pollution, erratic climate conditions, and extractivist development projects have degraded farmland and depleted vital resources. Despite this environmental precarity, successive Tunisian governments have remained committed to neoliberal development frameworks imposed by external actors like the IMF and the EU. These policies prioritize infrastructure for export logistics and tourism investments, not for rural livelihoods .
The problem is not simply a matter of capacity or poor planning. It is structural. Tunisia’s agricultural crisis stems from a deliberate model of economic governance that converts sovereignty into dependency. Since 1995, the emphasis has been on attracting foreign capital and satisfying European markets, leaving small farmers at the margins. Even development loans are tied to austerity and structural adjustment, rather than investment in public goods like irrigation systems, cooperatives, or agricultural research.
Efforts to revive the DCFTA threaten to entrench this dependency further. By aligning Tunisian agricultural laws with EU standards and removing protections for local farmers, the agreement would expose rural producers to unfair competition from subsidized European goods. Though negotiations have been stalled due to public resistance, the structural orientation of Tunisia’s economy remains shaped by these external imperatives. Without a radical policy shift toward food sovereignty, land justice, and community-led development, “Green Tunisia” will remain a nostalgic illusion.
Peasant Women and the Anatomy of Structural Exploitation
At the heart of Tunisia’s agrarian crisis lies a stark gendered injustice. Peasant women, though the backbone of the agricultural workforce, are systematically excluded from land ownership, labor protections, and decision-making structures. Representing over 70% of the agricultural labor force in Tunisia, rural women sustain food production under increasingly precarious and exploitative conditions .
Despite their vital role in agriculture, only 6.4% of Tunisian women own land. This disparity is the result of entrenched patriarchal norms, discriminatory inheritance systems, and a lack of legal enforcement mechanisms that could support women’s access to and control over land. Most female agricultural workers are employed informally, with no access to social security, healthcare, or workplace protections. Their daily wages often do not exceed 20.32 Tunisian dinars, equivalent to 6.5 USD, placing them far below the poverty line.
The dangers they face extend beyond economic deprivation. A chilling symbol of structural neglect is the phenomenon of “death trucks” overcrowded and unsafe vehicles used to transport rural women to farms. These vehicles frequently operate without licensing or basic safety standards and have caused numerous fatal accidents. This is not merely a transport issue; it reflects a broader system that devalues rural women’s lives and labor.
Moreover, the dismantling of cooperatives and the privatization of agricultural services have further eroded women’s ability to organize, access credit, or market their produce. Without secure land titles, access to capital is nearly impossible, and participation in government support programs is limited or nonexistent. This exclusion not only reinforces dependency but deepens intergenerational poverty and rural disempowerment.
A chilling symbol of structural neglect is the phenomenon of “death trucks” – overcrowded and unsafe vehicles used to transport rural women to farms. These vehicles frequently operate without licensing or basic safety standards and have caused numerous fatal accidents.
In this context, peasant women are not simply laborers, they are the most visible victims of a model of development that commodifies land while invisibilizing the labor that sustains it. But they are also leaders in resistance. From informal seed-saving networks to grassroots organizing, Tunisian rural women continue to carve out spaces of autonomy and survival within the cracks of a broken system.
Their struggle is emblematic of a broader political and ecological confrontation: between a model that reduces agriculture to extractive profitability, and one rooted in land, care, and justice. Recognizing and supporting peasant women is not a matter of charity, it is a precondition for any genuine rural sovereignty.
Palestine: Farming Under Occupation and Apartheid
Agriculture in the occupied Palestinian territories transcends mere economic function; it is a political act of resistance, a source of identity, and a symbol of steadfastness in the face of one of the world’s longest-standing military occupations. Yet Palestinian farmers face a complex web of structural violence, imposed primarily by the Israeli occupation. Area C of the West Bank, which constitutes approximately 60% of its landmass, remains under full Israeli control, encompassing most of the region’s fertile agricultural land. In this zone, Palestinians are systematically denied building permits and face severe restrictions on land access, agricultural infrastructure development, and water usage. The Israeli separation wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice, cuts through farmland, separating tens of thousands of farmers from their olive groves and fields. A 2024 study documented that nearly 10% of agricultural land in the West Bank has been rendered inaccessible due to the construction of this wall, leading to reduced output, economic losses, and community displacement .
In Gaza, the situation is even more dire. According to UN data, more than 57% of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip has been damaged due to Israeli bombardment and military activities since late 2023. These damages include complete destruction of orchards, vegetable plots, and irrigation systems, primarily due to military bulldozing, shelling, and restricted access . This destruction is not incidental, but part of a broader strategy of economic warfare that undermines Palestinians’ right to food and development. As of early 2024, the average daily water consumption per person in Gaza has dropped to between 3 and 15 liters—well below the WHO minimum standard of 50 liters per day—following Israeli attacks on water and sanitation infrastructure. In parallel, the dependence on Israeli-controlled water sources in the West Bank remains stark, with Israel supplying over 60% of household water consumption, and 39% of all water used in the region .
This dependence is exacerbated by discriminatory resource allocation: Israeli settlers in the West Bank consume four times more water per capita than Palestinians, according to Amnesty International. The agricultural sector, which once employed nearly 13% of the Palestinian labor force, has been reduced to below 6%, not because of industrial transition, but because of land seizures, crop destruction, and market obstruction. The Gaza Strip alone experienced damage to 18% of its farmland during the 2023 war, with entire harvests lost and over 70% unemployment among working-age adults . In this context, olive cultivation continues to be an act of defiance. Despite restrictions, Palestinian farmers persist in planting and harvesting olive trees, 63% of Gaza’s fruit-bearing trees are olives, as a way of maintaining their presence on the land and resisting displacement .
Israeli land and water policies are not neutral. As detailed by Tilley, they form part of an institutionalized regime of apartheid that seeks to fragment Palestinian geography, suppress economic self-sufficiency, and dissolve the material basis of national identity . The cumulative impact is not only the destruction of Palestinian agriculture but the attempted erasure of the peasantry as a social and political class. Yet during these pressures, the persistence of Palestinian farmers, through harvest festivals, seed-saving initiatives, and local food cooperatives, reveals a powerful counter-narrative: one of rootedness, resilience, and refusal to surrender the land.
Peasants as Global Frontliners of Sovereignty
Throughout history, peasants have never been passive subjects of exploitation, they have been the heartbeat of resistance against colonialism, capitalism, and land dispossession. From Haiti’s revolution to Algeria’s liberation, from India’s peasants’ movements to Brazil’s MST, the rural poor have repeatedly emerged as the fiercest defenders of life, territory, and dignity. Today, this legacy is embodied with extraordinary clarity in the steadfastness of Palestinian peasants.
This global convergence is not abstract, it is organized, alive, and growing. It is the heart of the La Via Campesina movement: a call for food sovereignty, agroecology, and a new relationship with the Earth that centers justice and autonomy.
Across the occupied West Bank, particularly in Area C, which constitutes over 60% of the territory—Palestinian farmers are subjected to a brutal matrix of settler colonialism, military violence, and environmental warfare. They face land confiscation, denial of water access, destruction of crops and infrastructure, and forced displacement through both bureaucratic means and settler terror. By 2020, approximately 67.5% of the total land of the West Bank and Gaza had been seized by the Israeli occupation, including 25% of Palestinian agricultural land.
Palestinian farmers are not merely economic actors, they are guardians of culture, memory, and resistance. Their act of farming is political. It is a declaration of rootedness against a regime of forced erasure. When a farmer in the Jordan Valley tends to his tomato field despite daily threats of settler raids, or when a woman in Masafer Yatta rebuilds her greenhouse after it is bulldozed, they are not simply growing food, they are defending Palestine.
Their resistance resonates far beyond their borders. It echoes in the struggles of Tunisian peasants fighting against trade liberalization and land privatization. It finds common cause with African pastoralists resisting land grabs, and with Indigenous communities across Latin America confronting agribusiness and extractive industries. This global convergence is not abstract, it is organized, alive, and growing. It is the heart of the La Via Campesina movement: a call for food sovereignty, agroecology, and a new relationship with the Earth that centers justice and autonomy.
Peasants are not remnants of the past. They are visionaries of the future. They offer the most coherent, grounded, and urgent alternatives to a global food system in collapse. In resisting monocultures, toxic chemicals, and free trade regimes, they defend biodiversity, community health, and ecological resilience. In replanting olive trees on confiscated hills, or rebuilding seed banks destroyed by war, they practice what La Via Campesina calls “popular peasant feminism” and “peasant internationalism”—movements rooted in land, struggle, and solidarity.
From Tunisia to Palestine, the message is clear: this system of imperialist greed and environmental devastation is in crisis. Its hunger for land and profit has reached a breaking point. And those who feed the world, the peasants, the landless, the Indigenous are rising with sharpened awareness, deep-rooted organizing, and unshakable dignity.
Now is the time for peasant internationalism. Now is the time for unity.From the South to the North—Peasants of the Earth, Unite!