French Wheat Mourns Its Best Customer: Algeria Has Learned to Live Without It

Amine Gharbi — Tunis, Tunisie — 2026-09-06

There is one picture France's farming press cannot frame: the silos of Rouen bursting at the seams while the Algerian buyers have vanished. For it must be said, with the smile the situation deserves: French wheat, king of the Algerian market for decades, is now nothing more than a statistical memory. And it is not Algeria that changed its mind — it is France that changed its policy.

Let us look at the numbers, for the numbers are merciless. Five seasons ago, France was shipping Algeria up to six million tonnes of wheat a year — its biggest market in the world, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In 2019, those sales were still worth nearly €1 billion. In 2023/24, 1.6 million tonnes remained. And in 2024/25? Zero. The USDA's official report is brutally frank: French deliveries have been "completely zeroed out." Two ships, 31,500 tonnes in total since July 2024: that is all France managed to get through — a fall of 97%.

Did France lose a customer, or did it fire one? The answer lies in a letter dated 30 July 2024 — the one in which Paris recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, flouting Algeria's constant positions and the resolutions of the United Nations. The very next day, Algiers voiced its "profound disapproval." And the Algerian cereals office (OAIC), which buys around nine million tonnes a year, noticed that French operators no longer appeared in its order books. Officially, nobody is excluded. Off the record, the invitation always seems to get lost in the mail.

What follows is an indictment that French farmers should read before they vote. Their own country's customs data show Algerian purchases of French cereals falling from €834 million in 2022 to €166 million in 2023, then collapsing by 99% in the first half of 2025: cereals, heifers and young cattle tumbling from €300 million to €4.2 million. FranceAgriMer, the French public agency, was forced to cut its export forecasts to third countries to 3.5 million tonnes for 2024/25 — the lowest level since the 2000/01 season. The wheat producers' union, the AGPB, has done the math: export revenues across all cereals fell from €11 billion in 2022 to €6.5 billion in 2023.

Meanwhile, Algeria did not weep — it diversified. Russia delivered 2.4 million tonnes in 2023/24 and established itself as the top supplier over the past two seasons. Argentina came in, and so did Romania and Bulgaria. The OAIC went from 22 suppliers to 32. Above all, Algiers has accelerated its march toward self-sufficiency: President Tebboune had announced it as early as February 2023 — three million hectares sown are enough to cover demand. In June 2025, the Agriculture Minister confirmed it: Algeria will not import a single quintal of durum wheat in 2026. The 2026 harvest, more than 24 million quintals of durum wheat, is a record not seen since 1962.

What Paris took for a political sanction is, first of all, a manager's choice — one that admittedly lands at a very awkward moment for Paris. Algeria never stopped buying wheat: around nine million tonnes every year. It simply stopped buying the wheat of a country that believes it can humiliate you in the morning and sell you its harvests by nightfall. The lesson is worth gold: food sovereignty is not decreed in the silos — it is won in the fields, and in dignity. While France rediscovers humility, Algeria is reaping. The two facts are linked. And that is exactly as it should be.