During his last meeting with the press on Saturday, April 23, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune addressed the issue of the diversion of subsidized wheat in Algeria. He pointed the finger at flour mills that practice fraudulent deliveries of bread wheat to breeders.
The number of flour mills incriminated is considerable. “We have counted nearly 160 flour mills that remove their wheat quota, but do not grind it and sell it directly to breeders and others,” said President Tebboune.
Monthly consumption of 40 quintals of wheat per capita
Continuing, he indicated “in a wilaya, we have identified a flour mill whose all the lots allocated to it correspond to a monthly average of 40 quintals of wheat per inhabitant. A consumer, if he needs 40 kilos, that’s good enough, but not 40 quintals per month”.
This situation is not new. It has been documented by the press and academic surveys. But this is the first time that the extent of these diversions has been revealed. Sometimes the practices are more sophisticated. The flour mill extracts only 25% flour and declares the remaining 75% as wheat bran when these percentages should be reversed. But it is more profitable to sell bran on the open market than flour at state-regulated prices.
2021, a memorable drought
The sheep herd is estimated at 28 million head in Algeria. This sector’s appetite for barley and diverted wheat is explained by the memorable drought of the previous crop year.
In the absence of green pastures, hay and straw, breeders fell back on concentrated feed, including barley and wheat bran. The ensuing tension resulted in an unprecedented price spike.
The quintal of wheat bran has exceeded that of wheat “while bran is only a by-product of wheat”, remarked a breeder at the height of the drought. Many breeders have had to sell part of their livestock to buy food for the remaining animals.
Finally, the breeders then fell back on soft wheat imported and subsidized by the State to support the price of bread.
An inefficient breeding method
But drought is not the only explanation. If the agricultural sector is struggling to meet the demand for meat in the cities, it is because the technical level of breeders remains dramatically low. This, while each year, universities see many promotions of technicians, agricultural engineers, and veterinarians.
The fattening of lambs is only seen through the supply of concentrated feed (commercial feed, barley, wheat bran, soft wheat) which provides energy but without the necessary supplementation in nitrogen. In cereal-growing areas, this could be produced by alfalfa or pastures sown with fodder mixtures, as tends to be practiced in Tunisia.
“The sheep eats its sister”
In Algeria, breeders are content to graze their herds on fallow land with a much less rich natural flora than fodder. In Tunisia, the Cotugrains company is developing a proactive fodder seed production policy based on a network of specialized farmers. The tonnages of seeds produced are constantly increasing and have reached 150 tons.
Today, with the rains of March and April, the pastures have become green again and the demand for concentrated feed is less.
In Saïda in the middle of a pasture, the sheep breeder Laaradj Hazam confides to Ennahar TV: “We suffered more than necessary. Hamdoullah ya Rabi [Praise be to Allah], look at this wealth. Good, even if there is a bit of a lack” And he repeats three times “Hamdoullah ya Rabi”.
For his part, Cheikh Moussaoui, with an emaciated face, testifies: “We had two years of drought. The food supply made us suffer. We bought a quintal of barley for 4500 DA and we had to go to the souk to sell animals”. Allaoua continues: “With the drought, the sheep ate its sister [to keep a sheep, you have to sell one]. He who had 200 sheep’s heads has only 100 left, and he who had 300 has only 150 left.”
With a broad smile, Aïssa Diyeb confides: “But now, it’s fine. Since it rained, the grass has grown and people are happy. We have less to give barley to the animals (…) We are starting to reform the herd by buying animals”.
Learn to grow weed
In the south, the spectacular development of maize silage production in the form of wrapped round bales in recent years is not enough to reduce the fodder deficit. In addition to the needs of sheep farming, those of dairy cattle farming must be taken into account.
In Saïda, the lambs frolic again in the grass among the wild mustard plants, young thistles, daisies and other umbellifers. Herders do not seem to have learned the lessons of the past drought. They remain with their traditional practices: the use of spontaneous flora whose food value is three times less than fodder.
In Tahent (Tunisia), Ali Omari, the breeder testifies: “With el khalt [the mixture], the lambs have more to eat. I sow a mixture made up of several forages: barley, oats, sulla, halba, guerfalla. The grazing period is thus longer and the ewes better fed. »
In Algeria, the agricultural services are groping. In the 1980s, they tried to develop a fodder, the médicago; but in vain. For periods of scarcity, local agronomic research has proposed the development of survival foods based on by-products from agro-food industries and nitrogen supplementation of urea-based rations, but the extension does not follow.
Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development launched a triangular agreement between breeders, slaughterhouses, and the National Cattle Feed Office (ONAB).
In the steppe zone, the HCDS has developed a policy dynamic for small hydraulics by building dykes in the bed of the wadis for the spreading of floods. These structures, which require few resources, make it possible to irrigate small areas of barley. Areas have been planted with fodder shrubs and others have been protected for 3 to 4 years to allow the steppe vegetation to recover.
Feed 45 million people and 28 million sheep
In Algeria, agriculture must feed 45 million inhabitants and the 28 million sheep listed. It has to be said that mutton competes dangerously with consumers’ supply of wheat.
This competition does not take place only at the level of diversions noted at the level of certain flour mills. It is more sneaky in terms of resource allocation. A third of the local cereal production consists of barley. But this food product goes to livestock and a good part of the wheatland is used as pasture.
In its April 2022 report, Group 3 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC noted that “the reduction of the space dedicated to intensive crops (for example in favor of reforestation projects or agro-ecological) can only be done if we transform our food globally, and in particular reduce our consumption of animal products (a primary source of occupation of natural spaces).”
In Algeria, extensive sheep farming continues using outdated techniques. Old habits die of life. At the current price of a tonne of imported wheat, a kilo of mutton is expensive for the state budget.
