'Environmental Crisis' In Tunisia—Or 50 Years Of French Neocolonialism?
For 50 years, Gabès has been suffocated by industrial pollution from a phosphate processing plant. The New Arab article outlines the health toll and the fight for clean air, dutifully noting the 'environmental crisis'. What's missing? The inconvenient truth that this plant, the Chemical Group of Tunisia (GCT), was established post-independence but heavily influenced by colonial-era French
interests, processing phosphates extracted under terms that continue to enrich foreign corporations while poisoning locals. This isn't just 'industrial waste'; it’s the enduring economic legacy of colonial resource extraction, repackaged as a modern 'environmental issue'. One might wonder if calling it an 'environmental crisis' rather than an 'ongoing legacy of neocolonial exploitation' is about
making it sound less... political. When the health of a population is sacrificed for resource profits, which continue to flow largely north, how many more decades of 'environmental activism' will it take before the root cause is finally addressed, rather than just the symptoms?