The Agricultural Landscape of Sahel Bizertin: A Heritage in Peril

Abstract

The present work focuses on illustrating the environmental consequences of the development of urbanization on the agrarian landscape of the Tunisian coast. It will be initially to show how this landscape is singular and evaluate in a second time the impact of rapid urbanization on the transformation of coastal agricultural space. Until they become a territory coveted by vacationers. The small towns of the sahel Bizertin have evolved in a very slow way because they are enclosed between the sea on the one hand and hills or mountain of one other. That developed an original form of appropriation of farmlands in the form of small plots of land dedicated to the cultivation of cereals, the arboriculture, the truck farming and the small breeding. The originality of this system comes on the one hand, to its vicinity with the mouth Oued Medjerda, the country’s most important waterway but with a peasant genius that h as developed a natural environment whose formation and evolution are a unique case in Tunisia. This is necessary to know, a culture that has largely contributed to shaping the landscape of this region, which, in view of its practices, will have given this region a character and an identity. These singular landscapes today suffer from the new pressure exerted on the land by the vacationers who chose this area as a new seaside place. The resulting pressure of urbanization will only aggravate the deterioration of this agrarian system and therefore cause degradation of the coastal landscape in the region. We are now entitled to ask about its future. It will then be necessary, inevitably, to de-encrypt this mixed landscape to identify the values and to determine the management strategies and its conservation and to find the means of adapting it to contexts in permanent evolution.