Tunisian authorities estimate that about 150,000 households make a residing from cultivating Opuntia.
The North African nation is the world’s second-largest producer of its fruit, after Mexico, with about 600,000 hectares of crops and a yield of about 550,000 tonnes per yr, based on the Meals and Agriculture Group (FAO).
Solely manufacturing allotted for export — a couple of third of general crops — has remained in good situation, stated Rabeh Hajlaoui, head of the division of plant well being at Tunisia’s agriculture ministry.
“We’re making each effort to save lots of these vegetation, that are an vital supply of revenue to some locals,” he defined, as one litre of extracted Opuntia oil could be bought for as a lot as $4,200.
Farmers additionally plant prickly pear cacti for his or her resistance to drought and desertification, and generally use them to demarcate and fence property in Tunisia and neighbouring Libya.
In Morocco, the place the primary circumstances of cochineal had been present in 2014, Opuntia is cultivated over a complete of 160,000 hectares.
In 2016, the Moroccan authorities issued an “emergency plan” to fight cochineal infestation by experimenting with numerous chemical compounds, burying contaminated cacti and conducting analysis on creating variants resilient to the insect.
Regardless of the plan, by August 2022, about 75 p.c of Opuntia crops in Morocco had been infested, based on Mohamed Sbaghi, a professor at Rabat’s Nationwide Institute of Agricultural Analysis (INRA) and the emergency plan coordinator.
In neighbouring Algeria, authorities recorded an outbreak in 2021 in Tlemcen, a metropolis close to the border with Morocco.
Prickly pear cultivation within the nation covers round 60,000 hectares, and the fruit is so cherished {that a} pageant devoted to it’s held yearly within the japanese Kabylia area.
