The Tunisian market absorbs 1.8 million liters daily while production reaches a maximum of 1.2 million, according to official data.
"Milk is essential, especially for our children," Noura Bchini, a 50-year-old housewife, told AFP.
Next to her, another client, Leila Chaouali, says she gets some "but at specific times, especially in the morning. In the afternoon there are no more".
This shortage came to light at the end of October when supermarkets posted the injunction: "two bricks of milk per citizen".
40 km west of Tunis, Mohamed Gharsallaoui, breeder in the village of El Battan, bent over his milking machine, explains that he has had to sell four cows in recent months to buy fodder and feed his twenty animals.
On his farm, this 65-year-old breeder shows his bills for hay, barley or corn-soya supplement, which he is struggling to pay.
The price of a 50 kg bag of supplement has been multiplied by 8 in 10 years to reach 81 dinars (24 euros).
Mohamed Gharsallaoui, breeder in the village of El Battan, west of Tunis, January 20, 2023 © FETHI BELAID / AFP
"Why are we running out of milk? Because we are not giving the cows the amount of food they need," he told AFP.
"At a loss"
From 30 liters of milk per day, each cow produces only 12. "We provide them with half the previous amount of fodder and grass," he says.
A passionate breeder who started 50 years ago with a single cow, Mr. Gharsallaoui is sad to see his herd dwindling.
"It's the cows that made my family live," laments this father of four adult children.
"Today I have to send (my children) to work elsewhere to support my cows."
The Tunisian Union of Agriculture and Fisheries (Utap) sounded the alarm a year ago "when breeders started selling their milk at a loss".
A child befriends a calf, in El Battan, west of Tunis, January 20, 2023 © FETHI BELAID / AFP
"The prices of animal feed have gone crazy with a 30 to 40% increase over one year. This is linked to the international situation, to the war in Ukraine in particular" which has caused cereal prices to soar, including Tunisia is a major importer, underlines its spokesperson Anis Kharbeche.
He is worried about the month of Ramadan, which will begin around March 22, "during which milk consumption increases and the shortage will reach one million liters per day".
These difficulties are accentuated by the drought that is raging in Tunisia, with dams filled to a maximum of 30%, according to UTAP.
"fresh grass"
To limit their losses, many farmers are forced to sell part of their livestock, either to local butchers or to breeders in neighboring Algeria.
According to Utap, Tunisian herds have been reduced by 30% in 2022.
Faced with this "slow collapse", the State, which had supported after independence (in 1956) the establishment of a milk sector, must take the initiative, believes Mr. Kharbeche, recalling that Tunisia managed to export milk in some years until 2017.
For the moment, the State has contented itself, in the 2023 finance law, with lifting taxes on the import of powdered milk, at the risk of competing with local production.
And recent statements by President Kais Saied blaming unidentified "speculators" for the sector's problems have not reassured breeders.
For Utap, the solution would be "a variable price" applied by the State to milk purchases, which would fluctuate according to animal feed prices.
And it would be necessary to "help farmers for the production of fresh grass", with a strategy for reprocessing wastewater and supporting them in the purchase of food supplements.
A woman milks a cow on a farm in El Battan, west of Tunis, on January 20, 2023 © FETHI BELAID / AFP
Milk is just one of the products affected by sporadic shortages in recent months, alongside coffee, sugar or oil.
Experts explain them by a lack of liquidity of the Tunisian state, which has a monopoly on the supply of subsidized basic products.
Highly indebted, the country has been negotiating for months a loan of almost 2 billion dollars with the IMF.
© 2023 AFP