Southern Algeria Turns Green: The New Agricultural Frontier

Adama Kaboré — Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — 2026-09-06

Oued Souf, Biskra, Timimoun, Adrar: where the maps once showed nothing but sand, hundreds of thousands of hectares of greenhouses, date palms and fields now stretch out. Of Algeria's roughly 45 million hectares of total agricultural land, only about 8.5 million are actually farmed — and it is precisely in that margin that its revolution is playing out: the government has pledged to bring 500,000 hectares of Saharan land into production within three years, and is targeting 3 million irrigated hectares, up from 2.1 million today.

The results are beginning to speak. The 2026 harvest reached around 5 million tonnes of cereals according to the FAO — the best since 2019, up 19% year on year. In the Sahara, yields of more than 80 quintals per hectare have been announced in the irrigation perimeters of Timimoun and Stah Agrout, against a national average of around thirty quintals. Foreign investors have understood: Italy's Bonifiche Ferraresi has signed with the National Investment Fund a 36,000-hectare project at Timimoun worth around €400 million, targeting up to 170,000 tonnes of durum wheat a year and some 6,000 jobs.

Behind these figures lies a titanic hydraulics: the Albian aquifer, one of the largest fossil-water reserves in the world, stretches over more than a million square kilometers beneath Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. And for drinking water, Algeria has launched the largest desalination program in its region: nearly $8 billion in investment, 27 plants by 2030 that are to supply around 60% of the country's drinking water — five new stations commissioned in 2025 have already lifted the share of desalination to 42%.

The dependency figures justify the effort: Algeria consumes more than 11 million tonnes of wheat a year and must still import around 9.2 million tonnes in 2025–2026, according to the USDA. But the trend is reversing — the 2024 agricultural census, the first since 2001, counted 230,000 more farms than twenty-three years ago, a gain the ministry attributes to the development of southern lands. Agriculture, which employs around a quarter of the national workforce, is winning its second front: the desert.

For the investor, the message is clear: land, managed water, record yields and a market of more than 45 million consumers within reach. For the continent: Africa can feed Africa — provided it irrigates its deserts. Algeria has understood. The results are growing.