Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores how Algeria’s drive for wheat self-sufficiency relies on groundwater-intensive desert agriculture, contrasting state-backed megaprojects with smallholder constraints, and showing how unequal resource access shapes the ambivalent political ecology of extractivism.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation's article examines Algeria’s capital-intensive expansion of Sahara agriculture, where fossil groundwater is extracted by local and foreign companies to achieve durum-wheat self-sufficiency, framed as strategic insurance for national sovereignty. It contrasts the struggles of smallholder farmers in northern Algeria, facing recurrent droughts and limited drilling authorizations, with the state’s facilitation of desert megaprojects such as the Italian agribusiness Bonifiche Ferraresi in Adrar.

It draws on four months of qualitative fieldwork (February 2024-June 2025) in Algiers, Bouira, Bordj Bou-Arréridj, Sétif, and Béjaïa, including over forty semi-structured interviews and on-site observations with farmers, agronomists, and state officials, combined with analysis of media, government, and corporate reports on wheat production in the desert.

It asks how to make sense of the contradiction between Algeria’s anti-imperialist discourse of food sovereignty and security, and its simultaneous promotion of state-facilitated groundwater extractivism for capital-intensive wheat production, one that privileges corporate actors over smallholders amid regional rivalry and US oversight.

Drawing on Linera’s view of extractivism as a technical system rather than a fixed mode of production (2013), and on debates between Hamouchene and Ajl, I hypothesize that Algeria’s food-sovereignty agenda reveals the political ambivalence of extractivism: unequal access to groundwater transforms a potentially emancipatory “sovereign extractivism” into one reinforcing elite accumulation.

By situating Algeria’s wheat production within imperialism and ecological governance, the presentation aims to reframe food sovereignty as a contested arena where corporate power persists, urging renewed attention to the political conditions under which extractivism might become socially and ecologically transformative.