Algeria has spent the past several years betting a growing share of its food security on wheat grown deep in the Sahara desert. According to local media, farmers in the country’s traditional grain-growing north, however, pushed back publicly against that strategy for the first time this summer, and the criticism came from farm organizations that have historically aligned with the government rather than opposed it.
Algeria, a country of roughly 44 million people in North Africa bordering Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya, has long depended on imported wheat to help feed its population. Reducing that dependency has become a national priority, and the government’s approach has been to expand cereal farming into desert provinces far south of the country’s traditional wheat belt, using irrigation systems fed by underground water.
Where the water comes from
According to local media, that irrigation draws on the North Western Sahara Aquifer System, a massive underground reservoir of ancient water shared by Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. The water is not replenished by rainfall in any meaningful way. Wells reach it at depths ranging from around 200 feet in the desert town of El Menia to more than 550 feet in Adrar, a province several hundred miles farther south, and the water itself carries a notable salt content of two to eight grams per liter. Both towns sit deep in Algeria’s Saharan south, well beyond Tamanrasset, the country’s southernmost major city and a common reference point for how far this farming push extends into the desert.
Bringing that water to a wheat field costs money at every stage: drilling the wells, installing pivot irrigation systems, and running electricity that the government subsidizes at half its normal price. Geographer Daniel Dubost flagged the basic tension in this approach as far back as 1986, noting the irony of pulling food out of the desert when it could be grown far more easily elsewhere.
A harvest disrupted, according to local media
For years, concerns about this strategy stayed largely confined to water engineers and salinity specialists. According to local media, that changed during the summer 2026 harvest, when agronomist Djamel Belaïd described an otherwise record national harvest badly disrupted by logistical failures.
Harvest equipment had been sent to the Sahara first, since wheat there ripens earlier in the season. That reportedly left northern grain-growing provinces short of machinery just as summer storms damaged ripe crops in Tiaret and Batna, two long-established wheat-growing areas well north of the desert. According to local media, the strain on the system turned tragic in one case, when a storage cooperative in the north lost a warehouse wall that collapsed under the weight of grain, killing one person. This incident has not been independently confirmed by other outlets.
When traditionally pro-government groups start objecting
Media reports say the National Union of Algerian Peasants, a farmers’ organization that has historically aligned with the government, had a local representative in Tiaret publicly question official statistics on available harvesting equipment. He reported being accused in turn of stirring up trouble for raising the issue. This account has not been independently confirmed by other outlets.
It is also reported that the National Interprofessional Council for the Cereals Sector, a body representing farmers, grain buyers, and other industry figures, raised similar objections and pushed for regulatory approval, so far unsuccessful, to let large southern farms store their harvest temporarily on-site rather than shipping it out immediately. According to this reporting, the complaints marked a shift: farmers were no longer focused only on long-term environmental risk to the aquifer, but on how equipment and resources were being divided in real time between the heavily subsidized south and the rain-fed north.
Government response
On June 29, Algeria’s Ministry of Agriculture launched a digital platform called Hassad.dz to track and match requests for combine harvesters. More than 1,300 machines were mobilized through this effort, drawing on the state grain agency known by its French acronym OAIC and AgroDrive, a state-owned equipment company created earlier this year to expand farm mechanization nationwide.
Grain collection centers were ordered to stay open seven days a week. Farmers without official farming credentials were permitted to deliver harvests simply by declaring their production. On July 1, Interior Minister Saïd Sayoud held a video conference with the country’s provincial governors, known locally as walis, to coordinate the harvest push toward the government’s stated national target of 50 million quintals of cereal collected. A quintal is a metric unit equal to 100 kilograms, meaning the target amounts to roughly 5 million metric tons.
According to local media, harvesters offered for rent through farming cooperatives, priced around 6,000 dinars per hectare, were booked well beyond capacity, while cheaper bagging-style harvesters, renting for around 4,000 dinars per hectare, sat unused because there wasn’t enough labor to run them. Each one reportedly requires five day laborers to operate, and workers were in short supply. Many northern cooperatives also rented harvesting equipment without arranging the trucks needed to move grain off the fields, a gap that points to a larger planning problem: Algeria’s shift toward bulk grain harvesting has not been matched by enough specialized trailers to support it.
The scale of the equipment shortage this season is confirmed across multiple Algerian outlets, even where the specific farmer accounts above rest on a single source. What began as a technical debate over groundwater sustainability has become a more immediate argument over where Algeria’s harvest equipment and government attention actually go.
