Carthage Magazine

Quick Answer — Since 1972, a state-owned fertilizer complex on the northern edge of Gabès has been processing phosphate rock into phosphoric acid and fertilizer, releasing sulfur dioxide, ammonia, and fluorides into the air and pumping phosphogypsum waste into the sea. In September–October 2025, a wave of gas leaks sent dozens of residents — many of them schoolchildren — to hospital, and the city rose: some 40,000 marched on 15 October and about 130,000 joined a general strike on 21 October, in a city of 150,000. The government promised to relaunch six stalled clean-up projects and to end sea dumping; a court refused in February 2026 to suspend the plant; a new leak hit in July 2026; and the movement to dismantle the polluting units continues. This is the fullest single account we have, updated as the story moves. Gabès should be one of the most beautiful cities in Tunisia. It is the only place in the Mediterranean where a palm-grove oasis runs down to the sea, the country's pomegranate and henna capital, the gateway to Matmata and the Dahar. It is also, by common Tunisian reckoning, the most polluted city in the country — and in the autumn of 2025 it became the centre of the largest popular mobilisation the country has seen since the revolution. Here is how that happened, what has changed since, and what has not. Fifty Years of Phosphogypsum Phosphate is Tunisia's great mineral inheritance. It comes out of the ground around Gafsa, and since 1972 much of it has been processed on the coast at Ghannouch, just north of Gabès port, by the Groupe Chimique Tunisien (GCT), which turns it into phosphoric acid and fertilizers for export. The economics are real: phosphate exports are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year and around 4% of GDP, and the Gabès complex employs some 4,000 people in a region of high unemployment. The by-product is phosphogypsum, a whitish sludge left behind when the rock is attacked with sulfuric acid. For five decades the GCT has pumped it straight into the Gulf of Gabès, untreated — between 14,000 and 15,000 tonnes a day, a cumulative total that now exceeds 500 million tonnes, according to an investigation published by Inkyfada in June 2026. The process concentrates the naturally occurring radioactive elements in the rock into the waste, along with heavy metals, and an audit carried out for the African Development Bank in July 2025 found "major non-conformities" in both air and marine pollution. The gulf, once one of the richest fisheries in the Mediterranean, has lost most of its seagrass and much of its fish; Stop Pollution, the residents' movement founded in 2012, puts the loss of marine biodiversity above 90%. Above the water, the air. The complex emits sulfur dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxides, and fluorides, and a European Commission study found concentrations near the plant far above Tunisian and international limits, correlating with elevated chronic bronchitis and asthma in the nearest neighbourhoods, Ghannouch and Chott Essalem. Residents describe far more — cancers, osteoporosis, miscarriages — and the frustration that comprehensive epidemiological data has never been gathered. The Promise of 2017, and the Reversal of 2025 None of this is new, and neither is the promise to fix it. In June 2017, after earlier protests, a Council of Ministers decided to dismantle the polluting units and move industrial activity out of the urban area. In 2019 a relocation plan followed. Neither was carried out. Then, on 5 March 2025, a Council of Ministers went the other way: it adopted a strategy to double phosphate-processing output, to build green-hydrogen and green-ammonia industries at Gabès, and to remove phosphogypsum from the national list of hazardous substances. To residents this read as a formal abandonment of the 2017 commitment, and the first protests of the year followed in April, outside the Industry Ministry in Tunis, and in May outside the Gabès governorate. The green-hydrogen plan — pitched to European buyers and tied to the new electricity cable to Italy — drew its own demonstrations, as our piece on Tunisia's power exports describes. October 2025: The City Rises The summer of 2025 was one of the hottest on record, and heat traps industrial fumes over the city. Between September and October, local authorities counted 122 cases of intoxication and asphyxiation, most attributed to leaks from the GCT's units — ammonia and nitrous fumes among them. The tipping point was footage of schoolchildren gasping for breath after a leak near their school. On 15 October, Stop Pollution brought around 40,000 people into the streets. Police answered with tear gas; the National Guard said protesters threw hundreds of Molotov cocktails and dozens were arrested. On 21 October the UGTT called a general strike across the governorate — "everything is closed in Gabès," a local union official told the press — and an estimated 130,000 people joined a march in a city of about 150,000. Solidarity demonstrations followed in Tunis on 25 October and in cities across the country; by November the protest-monitoring group FTDES was counting hundreds of demonstrations a month, with Gabès the theme that tied them together. Women were, and remain, at the front of the movement. What the Government Promised The state's response came in two registers. In parliament on 20–21 October, the Minister of Equipment, Slah Zouari, admitted that six clean-up projects worth more than 200 million dinars had been "started without being followed" — his words were "bad governance" — and announced their immediate relaunch, with contractors to be appointed by direct negotiation to save time. The list: A 6.2-million-dinar system to cut nitrogen-oxide emissions from the nitric-acid units, said to be 98% complete and due by end-2025. An 8-million-dinar project to reduce sulfur dioxide from the sulfuric-acid units, 70% complete. An 18.4-million-dinar ammonia-scrubbing upgrade on the DAP fertilizer lines, 84% complete, due within six months. A 30-million-dinar permanent fix for sulfur dioxide, to be tendered and built in the first half of 2026. A 6.2-million-dinar residual-gas project at the ammonium-nitrate plant, with monitoring installed and the second phase to start immediately. Talks with the African Development Bank on a further 180-million-dinar package. Above all, the minister ordered an immediate halt to phosphogypsum dumping at sea, with a controlled land storage site and a hydraulic pipeline to carry the waste there; a Chinese technical team was invited to inspect the plant. President Saied, for his part, called for urgent maintenance while restating that phosphate is a "fundamental pillar" of the economy. Where those promises stand. As of this writing, we have found no public confirmation that any of the six projects has been commissioned. The Inkyfada investigation of June 2026 describes sea discharge in the present tense. And on 22 July 2026, residents of Chott Essalem woke to another gas release, with Stop Pollution reporting dozens of people in respiratory distress. If the nitric-acid scrubber was finished by December, nobody has said so. We will update this section when the government does. The Court Says No Alongside the street, the movement went to law. The Gabès bar association filed an urgent application asking the Court of First Instance to suspend the polluting units. The hearing was postponed five times — 4 December, 25 December, 8 January, 22 January — while the court widened the file to include the health and environment ministries and the environmental protection agency, ANPE. At one hearing an expert witness put the cost of decommissioning a single unit at five billion dinars, noted that the complex has thirteen, and estimated that the gulf would need something like 150 years to recover. On 26 February 2026 the court rejected the application, finding insufficient proof of harm. Activists called the ruling a contradiction of evidence the GCT itself had produced; the FTDES called it a "serious step backwards"; the Committee for Justice said it hollowed out the preventive purpose of emergency relief. The plaintiffs are appealing, and the case on the merits is still to be heard. In the same weeks, one of the movement's best-known activists, Khayreddine Debaya, discovered he had been sentenced in absentia to a year in prison for "obstructing freedom of work," over a 2020 incident, on a complaint by the GCT. Why It Isn't Simple It would be easy to write this as a story of a villain and its victims, and residents would say that is exactly what it is. But the reasons the plant is still running are worth stating plainly, because they are the reasons it will be hard to close. The GCT is broke, the state is short of foreign currency, and phosphate is one of the few things Tunisia sells abroad in volume. Four thousand jobs sit inside the fence, in a governorate where the alternative employers are the oasis, the port, and a cement works. The complex is not one plant but thirteen units, and rebuilding them to international standards — the 2017 promise — would cost more than the country has been willing to spend. The green-hydrogen project offers Gabès new investment and new pollution in the same breath. And the government's own diagnosis, delivered by its own minister, is that the failure has been one of management: projects funded, studied, started, and never finished. That is the argument the people of Gabès have already lost patience with. Their demand is not better scrubbers but the dismantling of the polluting units, and their point, made on the banners in three languages, is that a clean environment is a right and not a development choice. What It Means If You're Visiting Gabès is safe to visit and worth it — the oasis, Souk Jara, the pomegranates, the road into the Dahar are all on the opposite side of the city from the plant, and on most days you will notice nothing. Our honest guide to Gabès has the practical version: avoid the shore at Ghannouch, prefer the beaches to the south or Djerba, expect the smell on still hot days with a northerly wind, and go as an informed guest. Spending money in the market and the oasis, and listening, is the most useful thing a visitor can do here. What to Watch The appeal against the February ruling, and the eventual judgment on the merits. Whether the land storage site for phosphogypsum is actually built — the single change that would matter most for the gulf. The first anniversary of the October marches, which the movement has promised to mark. And the budget debates in parliament this autumn, where last year Gabès eclipsed every other question put to the Industry Ministry. We will keep this page current. Sources include Reuters, AFP, AP, Inkyfada, Nawaat, Jeune Afrique, La Presse, TAP, Business News, and statements by Stop Pollution and the FTDES. Corrections and updates: info@carthagemagazine.com.

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