Tunisian Women Producers Making a Mark in a Man's World

Much like wine-mak­ing, the world of olive oil is largely a male-dom­i­nated indus­try. This is also true in Tunisia, where one-third of the land is cov­ered in olive groves and 300,000 peo­ple work in olive oil pro­duc­tion.

But many of these are women who are mak­ing a sig­nif­i­cant mark on Tunisia’s fast-grow­ing olive oil indus­try, even if it’s often from some­where behind the scenes.

The biggest con­tri­bu­tion of women to an indus­try worth 2 bil­lion Tunisian dinars ($723.7 mil­lion) in exports has been as a source of cheap labor dur­ing the har­vest sea­son. Ninety per­cent of har­vest work­ers are rural women who work as sea­sonal agri­cul­tural labor­ers. They are gen­er­ally paid a daily wage which is often less than that earned by the male work­ers doing the same job.

A small part of their daily wage goes to pay for trans­porta­tion from their vil­lages to the olive groves which is usu­ally orga­nized by their employ­ers, the farm own­ers. Bundled in mul­ti­ple lay­ers of cloth­ing against the win­ter cold, the women har­vesters spend their work­ing day pluck­ing the olive fruits from the trees by hand.

At the other end of the social spec­trum are highly edu­cated women involved in the every­day man­age­ment of their fam­i­lies’ olive oil busi­nesses. At the Tunisian Olive Oil Awards orga­nized by the Ministry of Industry this past April, sev­eral women climbed the podium to col­lect awards at a flashy cer­e­mony held at a high-end hotel.

Semia Salma Belkhira, gen­eral man­ager of fam­ily-run Medagro, received the sec­ond prize for a medium fruity Ruspina olive oil; while Rawia Ben Ammar, sales man­ager at Domaine Ben Ammar organic farm, took home the first prize for the fam­i­ly’s brand Société Mutuelle de Services Agricoles (SMSA), a farm­ers’ coop­er­a­tive bring­ing together agri­cul­tural work­ers in the town of Fahs and neigh­bor­ing areas. She also wears the hat of VP of the Union Régionale de l’Agriculture et de la Pêche, a union of agri­cul­tural work­ers; and is active in the Fédération Nationale des Agricultrices which rep­re­sents women farm­ers.

Hajabdallah wears a head­scarf and dri­ves a white Toyota pick up truck. This image is not incon­gru­ous in Tunisia, a coun­try where women like to do things on their own terms and where they have long had rights and free­doms their sis­ters in some other Arab coun­tries don’t.

“Women gen­er­ally work with their fathers and hus­bands on fam­ily farms,” she said from behind the wheel of her pick-up. She explains that one rea­son why women own so lit­tle land is that the cur­rent inher­i­tance law works against them: women can only inherit half of what their broth­ers do. The cur­rent gov­ern­ment has pro­posed to revise this law, which if passed would make Tunisia the first coun­try in the Arab world to grant equal inher­i­tance rights.

The drive from Fahs to her olive farm winds through a land­scape of undu­lat­ing hills punc­tu­ated by the loom­ing moun­tains of the gov­er­norate of Zaghouan, some 60 km south-west of the cap­i­tal Tunis. This is an agri­cul­tural region where 80 per­cent of inhab­i­tants make a liv­ing from the land.

Hajabdallah became an olive farmer when she decided to quit her pub­lic sec­tor job as an agron­o­mist to work the land she leased from the gov­ern­ment as part of a scheme to reha­bil­i­tate agri­cul­tural land and pro­vide a boost to local farm­ers.

Bordered by impos­ing cac­tus plants, her plot of land stretches over 40 hectares and is planted mostly with long neat rows of olive trees. In neigh­bor­ing fields ​“soft wheat” is cul­ti­vated for flour, as well as durum wheat for the semolina used to make cous­cous, a sta­ple of Tunisian cui­sine.

She points to a green plant with del­i­cate flow­ers. ​“I’ve also planted legu­mi­nous plants like fava beans and oth­ers that resist high tem­per­a­tures and fix nitro­gen into the soil. This improves its fer­til­ity and ulti­mately opti­mizes the growth and yield of my olive trees.”

Her trees are of the Chetoui olive vari­ety which resists the North African heat well but only pro­duces every other year. With her farm cer­ti­fied organic since 2014, Hajabdallah sells the olives she har­vests to the local com­pany AGROMED for their organic brand Oriviera which is exported to North America.

“My biggest chal­lenge is irri­ga­tion,” she said, ges­tur­ing towards the cracked earth. ​“This is a semi-arid region that’s been expe­ri­enc­ing a drought for the past three years. The water table here is low and the water salty. The state does­n’t offer com­pen­sa­tion dur­ing peri­ods of drought. The past sea­son was okay but last year was bad. The year before that was an excel­lent year for Tunisian pro­duc­ers.”

“The har­vest starts at the begin­ning of November and find­ing labor is get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult each year,” she said of the chal­lenges faced by local olive farm­ers. ​“Using machines is out of the ques­tion because they just don’t work for this vari­ety. The olives stick to the branches so we have to pick them by hand. Another prob­lem we have at har­vest is that small pro­duc­ers some­times have to wait a long time to press their olives because the mills get too busy. As you know, olives have to be pressed as soon as pos­si­ble, within 24 hours, to get a qual­ity oil.”

Further north in another rural land­scape near Mateur, 70 km north­west of Tunis located in the gov­er­norate of Bizerte, Afet and Selima Ben Hamouda tend to their olive groves. The fer­tile soil of this agri­cul­tural region has been used to grow cere­als since the times this was the bread­bas­ket of the Romans.

The Ben Hamouda sis­ters are in their thir­ties and part of a new gen­er­a­tion of olive grow­ers and pro­duc­ers whose focus is on mak­ing extra vir­gin olive oil of the high­est qual­ity. Though they’re the sixth gen­er­a­tion to tend their fam­i­ly’s land, they both left their pro­fes­sional careers to do so. In 2015, Afet quit her tourism mar­ket­ing job while Selima left her career in law to plant an olive grove and even­tu­ally launch their own brand, A&S, two years later.

“Our par­ents were very encour­ag­ing and sup­port­ive of our deci­sion,” shared Afet. ​“It was our father who said ​‘Why not plant olive trees?’ He pointed out that olive oil is a fast grow­ing indus­try in Tunisia. People are very sur­prised and curi­ous when they hear we’re olive pro­duc­ers. At first some of our friends laughed at us, but now a few have planted their own olive trees.”

“We did our research and from the begin­ning, we knew that we wanted to focus on qual­ity,” Selima added, speak­ing about their approach to olive pro­duc­tion. The sis­ters trav­eled south to Sfax to attend a train­ing pro­gram by the cham­ber of com­merce cov­er­ing all aspects of olive pro­duc­tion. ​“About half of the atten­dees were other women,” she said of the expe­ri­ence. ​“We got lots of excel­lent infor­ma­tion and advice but also encour­age­ment and sup­port, which con­tin­ues today.” Wanting to fur­ther expand on their knowl­edge, they trav­eled to Australia next for fur­ther train­ing.

“We con­tin­ued the work that our father had started on a test plot based on the prin­ci­ples of con­ser­va­tion agri­cul­ture,” Afet explained. ​“The aim is to con­serve the rich­ness of the soil so we rotate wheat and legumes every other year, avoid till­ing the land, and con­serve plant cover to min­i­mize ero­sion and evap­o­ra­tion. We need to try to keep mois­ture as much as pos­si­ble because we don’t get much rain.”

With 900 Chetoui olive trees already on their land, they decided to plant 12,000 trees of the Spanish vari­eties Arbosana and Arbquina which pro­duce fruit quickly. Also found in their groves is the Greek Koroneiki vari­ety, a pol­li­na­tor. ​“Of course we have to defend our Tunisian vari­eties too,” Afet ponted out. ​“So two years ago we planted nine more hectares of our native Chetoui.”

Their obses­sion with qual­ity extends to all phases of the pro­duc­tion process. In order to be able to press their olives as quickly as pos­si­ble and avoid delays at mills, they invested in their own two-phase milling machine.

“This is the only way to ensure qual­ity, by hav­ing our own mill,” Selima said of their deci­sion. ​“The oil mills in this region use a three-phase sys­tem which intro­duces water into the process and the qual­ity is not great as a result. Also, mill oper­a­tors often don’t sep­a­rate your olives from those of other pro­duc­ers so every­thing is pressed and mixed together. So hav­ing our own mill was absolutely essen­tial.”

“That first taste of new oil is a very emo­tional moment,” Afet said, express­ing the magic alchemy that hap­pens when months of hard work is syn­the­sized into a green-gold liq­uid. ​“We did­n’t really plan to have our own label, it just hap­pened. It was the log­i­cal next step.”

Awards have come quickly for their brand A&S. Last year, their medium Chetoui extra vir­gin olive oil won first prize at a national com­pe­ti­tion orga­nized by the Office National de l’Huile, while their intense fruity was awarded a fourth prize. 2018 has brought more acco­lades, with awards at well-known inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tions like BIOL Italy, and NYIOOC, where they won a Gold Award.

These two young women who are mak­ing a mark on Tunisia’s devel­op­ing olive oil indus­try now have an eye on the future. They’re work­ing on build­ing a new build­ing with space for a tast­ing room and believe that the local indus­try needs to develop fur­ther.

“Olive pro­duc­ers in Tunisia are get­ting noticed but there’s more to be done,” Afet told us. ​“We should teach cooks how to use olive oil and there’s also the scope to cre­ate spe­cial­ized olive oil bou­tiques and develop projects in olive oil tourism. Also, pro­duc­ers need to talk more and com­mu­ni­cate. We need to cre­ate a group of pro­duc­ers work­ing together on qual­ity pro­duc­tion. It’s only together than we can pro­mote the image of Tunisian olive oil.”