Photos by Daniela Sala for Foreign PolicyREDEYEF, Tunisia—In Tunisia’s Gafsa Valley, the desert takes on a different guise. In the late 19th century, the French military officer and geologist Philippe Thomas stumbled upon the Gafsa phosphate reserve, marking the beginning of a transformation in Tunisia’s southwest. “This black dust is everywhere,” said Abdelbaset Ben Hmida, a resident of the mining town of Redeyef. However, phosphate extraction comes with significant environmental costs: While fertilizers make Western fields green, phosphate mining dries up southern Tunisian soil. This blockade paradoxically has contributed to the air pollution in the sleepy mining town, as a massive open-air stock of phosphates has been sitting in the town’s center ever since.
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