Tunisia’s Opuntia Economy Battle Against Cochineal

News Desk

Tunisia: “At first, I wanted to experiment with prickly pear production and gradually develop investments while looking for customers outside the country, especially for its natural oil. But as the cacti became damaged, I abandoned the idea of investing and stopped thinking about it altogether,” said farmer Amor Nouira.

Devastated by the cochineal insect spreading across North Africa, Tunisia’s Chebika village’s 50-year-old farmer Amor has lost hope of saving his prickly pear cacti. He has seen his half-hectare of cactus crops wither as the invasive insect has ravaged about a third of the country’s cacti since an outbreak in 2021.

Prickly pear is consumed as food and used to make oils, cosmetics, and body-care products.

In Chebika, as in other rural areas in central Tunisia, many farmers’ fields of prickly pear—also known as Opuntia—have been spoiled by the cochineal, which began its spread across North Africa from Morocco a decade ago. The insect, native to the Americas like the prickly pear, feeds on the plant’s nutrients and fluids, often killing it.

The infestations have led to significant economic losses for thousands of farmers reliant on prickly pear as authorities struggle to combat the epidemic in a country where its fruit is a popular summertime snack.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Tunisia is the world’s second-largest producer of its fruit, after Mexico, with around 600,000 hectares of crops and a yield of about 550,000 tonnes per year.

Tunisia Agriculture Ministry Department of Plant Health Head Rabeh Hajlaoui informed that nearly 150,000 families depend on cultivating Opuntia. One litre of extracted Opuntia oil can be sold for as much as $4,200.

Farmers also plant prickly pear cacti for their resistance to drought and desertification and sometimes use them to demarcate and fence property in Tunisia and neighbouring Libya. In Morocco, where the first cases of cochineal were found in 2014, Opuntia is cultivated over a total of 160,000 hectares.

Rabat National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) Professor Mohamed Sbaghi stated that, the Moroccan government issued an “emergency plan” in 2016 to combat cochineal infestation by experimenting with various chemicals, burying infected cacti, and researching resilient variants. Despite these efforts, about 75 per cent of Opuntia crops in Morocco were infested by August 2022.

Public Safety

The region’s dry climate and climate change, with increasing drought and high temperatures, have facilitated their reproduction because neither the plant nor cochineal are native to North Africa, said Tunisian entomologist Brahim Chermiti.

The region has experienced severe drought in recent years, with declining rainfall and intense heat. Chermiti believes it’s a matter of “public safety” to combat cochineal infestation, requiring “strict border crossing monitoring and public awareness.”

Brahim fears total contagion, as “sooner or later, it will spread, with the help of many factors such as the wind and livestock.”

Initially, Morocco and Tunisia burned and uprooted infected crops, but authorities now aim for “natural resistance” to the insect. Last summer, Morocco’s INRA identified eight cochineal-resistant Opuntia varieties that could potentially be cultivated. Another solution is spreading the Hyperaspis trifurcata ladybird — also native to the Americas — among the cacti, as it preys on cochineal.

Last month, Tunisia received 100 ladybirds along with an emergency budget of $500,000 to battle cochineal, allocated by the FAO. AFP/APP