Nature – harryjohnstone

The Herbalists of the Souq El Blat

Tawfiq Ben Yacoub in his shop in the Souq El Blat

“The Souq El Blat is the heartbeat of the medina,” proclaims Mourad Boughanmi, a medicinal herb seller speaking from his shop in this historic quarter of Tunis. Indeed, for centuries, its herbs have sustained the bodies of people living here. Bundles of wild thyme, sage, poppy, garlic and eucalyptus have lined the walls of this shadowy Souq for at least 700 years.

Since Covid-19 entered Tunisia last year, some herbalists say demand for plant medicine has grown, with greater numbers wanting to strengthen their immune systems naturally. But customs are changing, and without any state support, this trade has become endangered.

Five thousand years ago the Sumerians of Mesopotamia documented the health-enhancing properties of wild plants. These early texts articulated the ancient practice of herbalism, where ecology, biology and chemistry meet. In the ensuing millennia, medicinal herbs have been picked and prepared to help with a number of different ailments. In the cavernous shops of the Souq El Blat, this profession lives on.

Down the Rue Bacha Hamba, Tawfiq Ben Yacoub, a herb dealer with a passion for art, history and music has a shop with the chaotic feel of an artist’s studio; it is filled with flasks, bottles, paintings, bags of old herbs and the sweet smell of incense. He tells his story over the quiet fuzz of a radio and bleating mopeds passing by.

As a boy, he would hike with his Libyan father in the green mountains near Benghazi, where he learnt about medicinal herbs. He describes the 10th century Tunisian physician, Ibn al Jazzar, advancing herbal medicine in Tunisia and across North Africa. After the Islamic Golden Age, Ben Yacoub believes medicine stagnated across the Muslim world compared with Europe due to weaker institutionalised scholarship. “We lost knowledge of this science when we lost the scripts,” he says. “Today our children learn about Ibn al Jazzar, but as history rather than for scientific training.”

Nearby, in his shop next to the Khilwiya Bilhassan mosque, Chowki El Foutt is another herb dealer who sees his vocation as a strand in Tunisia’s rich and complex history. El Foutt says it was the Ottoman Turks who really established herbal medicine here, from the 16th to the 18th centuries. He views his practice as part of Tunisia’s patrimoine. “Just as we have heritage in clothes and language, so we have herbal medicine. It is something we need to keep.”

Yet with the rise of pharmaceutical medicine, these herbalists can appear artisanal. They also lack outside support. When I ask Mourad Boughanmi whether he receives state aid, he creases with laughter. “We get zero help”, he said. Several others say the same thing.

Being marginalised in this way is frustrating for Samir Ben Youssef. A herbal doctor specialized in aiding women’s fertility, Ben Youssef has inherited his father’s profession and treated patients in the Souq El Blat for 20 years.

“People think herbalists are charlatans”, says Ben Youssef, shaking his head. He is trying to resist this labelling by ensuring his results are assessed at clinical laboratories through CBEU tests and other standard, scientific procedures. While using these modern practices, the basis of his learning reaches back as far as the great 11th century Persian polymath, Ibn Sena.

“100 years ago, this whole road as far as the mosque (Zaytuna) was lined with herboristes”, says Ben Youssef. “There was a whole chain of people who went to gather the herbs. But young people today don’t want to work in this trade anymore. And the elders don’t want to pass on their knowledge,” he says. “So it will disappear.”

Though there are some younger herbalists, like Yacine Ben Moussa, who believe that modernity offers advantages. “Before I only worked with herbs that grow in Tunisia,” he says. “Now, with the internet, I can google things and order foreign herbs online.” Among the shelves of plant medicines, which include cloves, anise and chia seeds, he shows me a framed certificate of phytotherapy from an academy of complementary medicine. Clearly there are institutions of learning.

As Samir Ben Youssef intimated, however, the reputation of herb dealers may present a problem. They are associated with black magic. Many of the shops sell turtle carcasses as lucky charms. Some allegedly sell crushed iguana and hedgehog carcasses. One gave me a bag of cowrie shells and black nigella seeds to ward off the evil eye.

These customs might confirm suspicions that herbalism is hogwash, but it’s worth seeing them in context. Despite its secularism, spiritual belief still heavily influences Tunisian society. In medicine, while Tunisia has largely adopted western practices, the relationship between spirituality and healing lives on. This broader view of medicine – which herbalists span – has arguably helped to sustain a more holistic, intuitive approach to healing.

As I leave the medina, taking in the smells of leather and jasmine scent from a succession of cavernous shops, I pass the crumbling main entrance of 7th century Al Zaytuna mosque. My head is alive with thoughts of shamans, Ibn Sena and the madrassas, and the people once employed in gathering the plants and seeds to heal the sick.

I reflect on a part of herbalism that modern medicine – like many modern things – has lost, in being processed and abstracted: the relationship between things. In this Souq, a person suffering from diabetes can see and touch and smell the wormwood that they hope will heal their illness. Through the herbalist, they can learn about its anti-diabetic effects, and that it grows among the craggy rocks of the southern Jebel Oust mountains.

This is important: it reminds people that most medicine is essentially drawn from the living or organic world, a basic fact that may be lost to many consumers of western medication. This is not to discredit western medicine at all – its importance, for billions of people, is undeniable. But it is to remember that humbling, sacred aspect of medicine; that much of what heals us can be found in nature.

An edited version of this article was published in The Guardian

‘The Dates Are Drying’: Climate Change and Water Scarcity in Tunisia

Mansour Rajeb is wrapping a plastic protective sheet around a branch of dates in his oasis near the village of Bchelli, in southern Tunisia. Tying it up, he lingers.

“I’m worried,” he says. “The quality is getting worse. The dates are getting drier.”

Like thousands of farmers across the region, the effects of the climate crisis and water scarcity are threatening his livelihood. “When the quality is poor, we receive lower prices. I’m earning less. This year, I’ll earn a third of last year, which was an average year.”

On the road out of Bchelli, a gust of wind makes the sand rise like steam. Beyond the palm trees lies desert; a flat, barren terrain of scrub, rock and sand. Communities have survived here for thousands of years, but their changing environment and practices may soon make it uninhabitable.

Overall temperatures here have risen by about 1C since 1988, according to data collected by the meteorological office in Tozeur, the capital of the region’s western district. This far exceeds average global warming levels.

“Temperatures used to peak in August and then fall, but now the heat persists until October,” says Taieb Foudhaili, of South Organic, a date exporting company based in Kebili. Given this pattern of warming, humidity levels are falling. The plants adapt by releasing water. The result, says Taieb is a drier, poorer product. His company must now do more sorting to maintain quality standards.

Global heating has also created shorter periods where date palms can flower and pollinate, according to Nabila el Kabri, an agronomist based in Kebili. As a consequence, Nabila has observed a decline in the productivity of dates per hectare.

But it’s not just rising temperatures causing anxiety. Over the past few decades, and particularly after Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, unlawful plantations have spread like blots across the white landscape. The state has failed to exert proper controls. There are now 38,000 declared hectares of palm tree across the Kebili region, though the real figure is probably as high as 50,000 hectares. Two thirds of the entire country’s dates are produced here.

Tunisia’s population has trebled since 1960, while gross national income per capita has fallen since 2010. In a region where almost half of young people are underemployed, agriculture offers a lifeline for many. After olive production, dates are Tunisia’s second most valuable agricultural export. The sector is worth more than US$ 200m. This revenue is vital, sustaining more than 600,000 people.

But a consequence of ever more palm plantations is water scarcity. Date palms are thirsty. On each hectare there are between 100 to 140 palm trees. Each tree requires the equivalent of 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of water each year. Neither the old natural springs nor base groundwater can meet this demand.

Farmers are resorting to drilling and pumping water from aquifers. There are now about 30,000 wells, hundreds of metres deep, across the country. Half of these were drilled illegally, according to a 2017 report by Tunisia’s Ministry of Agriculture. Water levels are being increasingly overexploited across southern Tunisia. Half of this water is not renewable.

“If we keep creating these new oases, with thousands of hectares of new trees, then over 10 to 15 years we won’t have any water left. It’s a question of sustainability,” says Nabila El Kabri.

From the 13th century, water systems and inter-cropping practices meant Tunisians were masters in managing their scarce resources. However, modern palm plantations are essentially monocultures, producing the valuable Deglet Noor variety of date and little else. When this crop fails, farmers have little to fall back on.

Some are already suffering. Mansour said he has farmer friends who have already sold their trees from the new, poorly irrigated oases, because their crop was “so feeble”. Nabila says it is only a matter of time before date production as a whole will have to migrate north to Gafsa.

Ultimately, both problems Tunisia’s date farmers face – climate change and water scarcity – arise from a similar myopia; a common failure to see things holistically. “We are only thinking about the product,” said Taieb, “when we should be thinking about the air, the tree and the soil. We need to change the way we think.”

Lying in the shade of a palm tree in Chebika, 71-year-old Younes Belgasim is an unlikely figure of hope. His oasis is thriving. Younes is one of 18,000 people benefitting from a US$ 5.7m World Bank project that launched in 2014. The project provided Younes with seeds for vegetables and fruit trees, it improved his land’s soil and irrigation, and he got better fencing (protecting his plot from local wild boars).

The World Bank initiative supported Younes in restoring the traditional ‘three levels’ inter-cropping system. On his oasis, the date palms give shade to vines, banana, pomegranate and fig trees, while vegetables and wild grasses grow beneath.

This system demands more from farmers, and it may deliver less immediate commercial pay-off than exclusive Deglet Noor date production.

Both factors deter those farmers looking to work less and earn their revenue in one date harvest season. Inter-cropping can use more water, though it preserves water by maintaining humidity levels within the oasis ecosystem. Crucially, it improves the soil quality and strengthens biodiversity. And it diversifies farmers’ assets. This ecosystem-based farming can be a win-win: it protects farmers from climate, economic or disease-related shocks, while also preserving the natural environment.

“It is getting hotter,” says Younes, “but I’m not worried about climate change”. In a situation that’s becoming seriously worrying, perhaps his sense of security, as well as year-round earnings, will persuade others to farm in this way.

The Guardian

Ghosts of the Thar Desert: On the frontline of climate change in Pakistan

Ebu squints and her face creases into a dozen lines. She is peering down into her well but the act is pointless. She knows there is nothing down there. In moments of despair, life in Mal Nor, her drought-stricken village in the Thar Desert, seems equally senseless. With the climatic changes under way here, her ancestral lands in this part of south-eastern Pakistan are becoming almost uninhabitable.

“It used to rain a lot before,” she says, speaking in the Marwari language that is specific to this region. “It doesn’t now. It has drastically stopped.”

We stand by her well, near a couple of thatched huts and six sleepy goats that are tethered to a post. Her son and two young women look on; her small grandson, chapatti in mouth, stares, then breaks into tears. The surrounding landscape is sparse: sand, shrubs, the odd teak tree.

Ebu and her family are from an indigenous tribe called the Meghvars, who have lived in the Thar Desert for thousands of years. The land is full of such tribes; pastoral people whose livelihoods have mostly depended on goats and cattle.

Camels, peacocks, snakes and blackbucks share the arid 200,000 sq km expanse, most of which lies across the border in Rajasthan, India’s north-western state.

Scarce rainfall is not new here. Many of the elders describe their age in relation to a chapano (drought). Ebu says she has survived several chapano, at times eating merely grass and ants. These people are born survivors but their days in Tharparkar, as the district is called, might be numbered.

Farmers are losing their crops, cattle and goats because of the drought. Children are starving to death. Villagers are taking their own lives. Near Mithi, Tharparkar’s main town, several locals tell me that rainfall has halved in this region over the past two decades.

And it’s getting hotter. Across a range of indices, the Nasa Earth Exchange (NEX) has found that, over the past 50 years, temperatures in Sindh province, south-eastern Pakistan, have risen by more than 1.5C, around double the global average. Something has changed.

For a decade, I worked as a policy analyst for the UN and other organisations around the world. Reading countless reports at my desk in Rome, I became familiar with Pakistan’s particular vulnerability to natural disasters.

Over a 20-year period between 1998 and 2017, it experienced more than 140 climate-related events, such as hurricanes, flooding and heatwaves, causing more than 10,000 deaths and $3.8bn in losses each year through damage.

When I left the UN a few years ago, it was to write independently about hunger, climate change and other development challenges. In January, I decided to visit Pakistan to try to learn more about the lives of some of those most vulnerable to global warming.

The road that I take from Digri to Mithi shimmers in the heat. It was improved recently, with coal money, though the funds mostly went into constructing an open-cast coal mine and power station, located 70km away. The complex, known as Thar Coal Block II, was developed as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $60bn energy and infrastructure scheme that is under way across Pakistan. It began supplying electricity to Pakistan’s national grid in June.

Despite the asphalt-softening heat, which is now killing animals and people in southern Pakistan, the country’s efforts to extract fossil fuels from the ground are accelerating, generating ever higher carbon emissions.

For years, Pakistan’s population and manufacturing industries have suffered blackouts. CPEC offers a means to resolve the country’s energy crisis and, like all developed countries have done in the past, it helps both Pakistan and China pursue their fossil-fuelled industrial growth.

Banaras Khan, who is supporting climate-smart agriculture in Pakistan for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Islamabad, tells me the recurrent drought phenomenon in Tharparkar “gained momentum after 2013 and is becoming more frequent”. He says that a recent climate analysis the FAO conducted for Sindh province shows this can be attributed to climate change.

On the ground in Tharparkar, the land is so barren that even pasture cannot grow. Along the roadside, there are carcasses of animals, abandoned and atrophying, their skin caved-in between their bones. Locals here say “your livestock are like your diamonds” — a coping strategy when all else fails. When their animals starve, the owners are crushed.

A local historian called Bharomal Bheel tells me he visited a village called Jorvu, and saw a man who had just lost 300 sheep. Starving and dehydrated, they were killed by diseases. He was “completely broken”, crying in despair, says Bheel.

Alexander More, a climate historian at Harvard University, says Pakistan exemplifies how climate change can drive existing weather patterns to new extremes. “When we think of climate change, we usually think of global warming. But the reality is that, while temperatures are going upwards, with it also comes a pattern of increasing climate extremes. Southern Pakistan is an example of a place that is experiencing increasing droughts.”

Across the whole country, the risks are growing. The Himalaya, Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain ranges in the north of the country hold 5,000 glaciers. Temperature rises or earthquakes can trigger what are called glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOF, which threaten populations living in the valleys and plains below.

In 2010, the Booni Gol outburst killed almost 2,000 people and destroyed 1.6 million homes. Thousands of acres of farmland were damaged. Today, analysts say seven million people in Pakistan are vulnerable to such floods.

The effects of rising temperatures are equally ominous for Pakistan’s lowland populations. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report described how a global rise of 2C would have appalling consequences for South Asia’s megacities. By 2050, Karachi will have an estimated population of 24 million, and be likely to experience “deadly heatwaves” of 49C on an annual basis.

Sindh province was once at the heart of the great Indus Valley civilisation, which emerged more than 6,000 years ago, and thrived by channelling water via canals and dykes.

Today, high population levels and poor water management mean that Pakistan is running out of fresh water. The Indus River Basin Authority believes the country will suffer a shortage of 37 billion litres by 2025. These concerns will be intensified by potential “water wars” between India and Pakistan, should current tensions between the neighbouring countries escalate.

In the Thar Desert, communities already face an existential threat: there is nowhere near enough food to go round. Hundreds of thousands of people in Tharparkar, more than half the district’s population, face acute food insecurity, meaning they experience hunger but can go entire days without eating anything. Some 400,000 children under five are acutely malnourished, according to the FAO. More than 500 children died from hunger-related causes last year.

As crops fail, and livestock wither and die, the communal nature of life that has bound people in the Thar Desert together for so long is breaking apart. Villagers can no longer afford to stay on their lands. Ebu says that “most healthy men” have had to migrate to cities or towns where they hope to find work as day-labourers. “When they return,” she says, “they only bring things for their own family.”
Others complain in similar terms. Bheel calls it a “drought in community”. Perhaps it is this — the sense of togetherness evaporating — that causes most unease. “We are constantly worried,” says Ebu. “We’re in a constant state of anxiety. It’s as if we are drowning.”

As with most slow-motion humanitarian crises, the issue is not that there are no solutions — but that they require political will, finance and attention. For dry-land communities like those of the Thar Desert, technologies such as land terracing, drip irrigation and mulching can save water and preserve soil quality, sustaining the livestock and crops on which people depend. Such steps would mean major financing as well as government and international support.

The broader need to meet Pakistan’s energy requirements is also not unattainable; billions of dollars of investment are pledged at climate conferences every year. Some of this money could and should be invested in developing countries like Pakistan, enabling them to shift their fossil fuel-powered growth models towards renewable energy alternatives. Overall, it is a massive project and, in relative terms, there is very little time. It’s hard to feel optimistic.

One evening, Bheel tells me several tales, from legend and personal experience, recalling djinns (ghosts) and deos (spirits) and the alarming feats of the goddess Aver Devi. “My grandmother’s ghost stories were the worst,” he says, “because they seemed so true.”

Reality is beginning to attain something of these stories.
Late one night, with a guide, I visit a village in the desert. The moon and stars are bright enough to reveal our shadows on the sand. In the monochrome light, the landscape resembles a blackish sea. In silence, we come across some abandoned thatched huts; black shapes in the darkness.

We find other huts. Two figures emerge. A man says his eight brothers and their families have left this village. His is the last family left. It is a ghost village. Soon, because of climate change, places like these will be uninhabited, and the desert wind will be the only sound; a long, drawn-out gasp of what once was.

Financial Times Magazine