NEFTA, TUNISIA (AFP) – A remote oasis in Tunisia’s desert was exhausted by decades of wasteful water use for agriculture – but now pioneers around an eco-lodge are reviving the spot with innovative projects.

They hope their back-to-basics approach can keep alive the ancient Saharan caravan stop and its traditions as a sustainable alternative to the region’s high-irrigation date plantations.

“Among the palm trees, everything can grow,” said Mohamed Bougaa, 63, a farmer in the remote Nefta oasis, a seven-hour drive from the coastal capital Tunis.

“There’s everything you need here: vegetables, fruit. We can plant peppers, tomatoes, carrots – everything grows when there’s sun and water.”

The problem has been that the Nefta spring – which once delivered some 700 litres of water per second – has been exhausted to irrigate the region’s famous dates, called “deglet nour”.
“The Nefta springs dried up 20 years ago,” said Bougaa.

As underground water sources have failed and summer temperatures peaked at a scorching 55 degrees Celsius last August, the season’s crop has been disappointing.

Patrick Ali El Ouarghi, who runs an eco-tourism lodge in the oasis, said date palm plantations, at the right scale, can be run sustainably.

He called them an ideal demonstration of permaculture, a system for producing food organically by mimicking natural ecosystems.

“The palm trees protect the fruit trees, and the fruit trees protect the vegetable patches, it’s natural in an oasis,” El Ouarghi said.

The French-Tunisian set up his Dar Hi lodge 11 years ago – including the so-called “Palm Lab” where engineers, architects and artists discuss how to conserve the oasis.

The ecology project aims “to make investors and farmers want to reinvest in the oasis, because it’s decaying a bit”, he said.

A key theme is tackling the severe water shortages by experimenting with technology such as drip irrigation.

The current system of flooding orchards with water, pumped from 100 metres below ground, is wasteful, he said.

Not far from Dar Hi, others are trying different ways of creating value in the oasis.

American Kevin Klay, 35, a former resident of Sousse in northern Tunisia, said he fell in love with dates during a visit to the south.

“We realised that many dates, up to 20 to 30 per cent, were thrown out and not used because of a small visual blemish,” he said.

So he bought a few kilos, removed their seeds, dried them and then put them through a coffee grinder.

The result, he said, was a sweetener “with a fifth of the calories of white sugar” that is full of fibre and contains “more potassium than bananas”.

Armed with this knowledge, Klay in 2018 launched “Dateible”, selling his “date sugar” produced from the organic-certified desert fruits for export.

He now employs nine people, seven of them women.

“We’ve seen huge demand, particularly in the US where our main market is,” he said.

The firm is exporting dates in bulk and also starting to sell on online retail site Amazon.

Several firms are producing other date derivatives such as a coffee substitute made of date pips and a form of molasses for use in pastries.

Back at the lodge, the restaurant is reviving traditional desert cuisine.

“It’s very simple and dates from the arrival of nomads,” when Nefta, today regarded as a spiritual home of Sufism, was a key stop on Saharan desert routes, El Ouarghi said.

They brought “unknown flavours and spices that have remained here as a tradition”, he said.

Chef Najah Ameur said residents create their own unique spice mixes.

“It’s not the same as buying them at the market: cleaning the leaves, the smell, the flavour, you have to know exactly how to do it,” the 40-year-old said. She cooks a menu of dishes she learned from her mother and from French celebrity chef Frederick Grasser Herme, the recipes collated in a recently published book on oasis cuisine.

“Many ingredients come from the palm groves: parsley, celery, chard, green beans, peas,” she said.

Some recipes are also adapted to use Moringa, an Indian tree famed for its nutritional and medicinal qualities and its ability to thrive in arid conditions.

The tree species may be new to the oasis, but residents are hoping that a mix of old and new can keep both their community and their ecosystem in good health.

LVIV, UKRAINE (AP) – Until the missiles struck within walking distance of the cafes downtown, Ukraine’s cultural capital was a city that could feel distant from the war. The early panic had eased, and the growing response to morning air raid sirens was not to head downstairs but roll over in bed.

But last Friday’s Russian airstrikes at dawn in Lviv, just outside the international airport, made nearby buildings vibrate and shook any sense of comfort as thick black smoke billowed.

Still, the hours after the airstrikes were absent of the scenes in other Ukrainian cities that have horrified the world: shattered buildings and people fleeing under fire. Lviv was already returning to its centuries-old role as an ever-adapting crossroads.

“In the morning it was scary, but we have to go on,” said local restaurant worker Maria Parkhuts. “People are arriving with almost nothing, and from where it’s worse.”

The city has been a refuge since the war began nearly a month ago, the last outpost before Poland and host to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians streaming through or staying on. From the other direction come aid and foreign fighters.

Midstream is a city that, on the surface, carries on amid world heritage coffee kiosks. Food delivery cyclists with backpacks of global brands wobble down the cobblestones. Yellow trams ding through narrow streets lined with the history of one occupation after another, from the Cossacks to the Swedes to the Germans and the Soviet Union.

The threat of another occupation by Russia, after so long a fight to break from its influence, and so close to the rest of Europe, is where the new Lviv emerges now.

“It’s war,” said 28-year-old soldier Maxim Tristan, of last Friday’s attack. “It only makes us more motivated to fight.”

On a street corner, young men line up outside a weapons shop, passing around a gun sight.

Anything’s available if you have cash, one man said, prompting grins from the others. On the same block is a range for target practice, with the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the bull’s-eye. Elsewhere in the city, military veterans train civilians how to shoot.

In a popular city park, a bunker from World War II has been re-opened just steps from the playground. Outside an academy for architecture, men are filling sandbags.

In the military section of the main cemetery are more than a dozen graves too new for marble crosses. The earth is piled with frosted flowers. The ground is marked with boot tracks. Behind the graves is open ground ready for several rows more.

Hours after last Friday’s attack in Lviv, activists placed 109 baby strollers in the square at the heart of the city to represent the children killed in the war.

Volunteerism has also seized the city. People are opening their homes, and local news outlets report on residents cutting up old clothing to make camouflage netting for checkpoints.

“War is not just people who fight,” said Volodymyr Pekar.

The 40-year-old local businessman is behind a drive to dot the countryside around the city with yellow-and-blue billboards with slogans including ‘Do not run, defend’.

Pekar has also used crowdfunding to raise money for what he called one of Ukrainian soldiers’ biggest needs: flak jackets.

In the shadow of slogans and bravado are the estimated 200,000 people who have fled to Lviv from harder-hit parts of Ukraine. Embraced by the city’s residents and absorbed into homes and shelters, they look the most nervous of all.

The displaced pick through boxes at aid collection points, scan notices, check their phones.

Their presence has led Lviv to pivot from getaway to refuge: Instead of promoting local confectionaries and romantic places, the city’s official tourism website now shares information on bomb shelter locations and radiation alerts.

Promising ‘warmth for the soul’, locals last Friday launched a distinctly Lviv series of free cultural walks for internally displaced people, with the aim of visiting galleries, the medieval quarter and more.

Just days ago, thousands of newcomers crammed the central train station at the height of the flood of refugees heading west. Now the station’s platforms at times are almost bare, awaiting the millions who continue to roam Ukraine looking for a place of rest or a new purpose.

There was the furniture maker from the bombarded capital, Kyiv, who trained in air defence years ago and was on his way to an army post. Standing alone on the platform with a backpack and sleeping mat, he planned to visit his family in the western Transcarpathia region before heading east again.

Farther down the platform was a young couple, restlessly remaining in Ukraine because the man, 20, is of fighting age and is prohibited from leaving.

“I didn’t travel my country this much. Now I have to,” said the woman, Diana Tkachenko, 21.

Their journey began last month in Kyiv on a crowded train and with no idea where they were going.

Their arrival in Lviv was terrible. Fellow travellers pushed and screamed, Tkachenko said. Some were coming from so far east, from Russian-speaking areas, that they didn’t speak Ukrainian.

Their train had pulled into the most Ukrainian of cities. For Tkachenko, it was her first visit to Lviv.

“I walked a lot,” she said. “I tried to enjoy the place. It’s really beautiful. It feels a lot more safe.”

But there were too many people and no place to live, she said. She and her boyfriend decided to head back east, toward Kyiv.

As their train prepared for departure, yet another was arriving.