TUNISIA: Use for the White Elephant

Among the world’s fledgling nations, the U.S. has had no better friends than Tunisia and its anti-Communist President Habib Bourguiba. But as the U.S. pondered for two years whether to build a sorely needed dam in Tunisia, Tunisians grumbled that neutralist nations were getting plenty of money.

Few areas in the world could profit more from water than Tunisia’s Sahel region, where some 4,000 farmers scratch out a living. But U.S. Development Loan Fund technicians argued that there was not enough water in the Nebana River to warrant building a dam. “It might be no more than a beautiful white elephant,” said an observer.

Tunisians insisted that there was enough water underground which could be tapped by wells to supplement the river supply. DLF officials mulled it over. Finally, when President Eisenhower paid his brief visit to Tunisia last December, Bourguiba told him that a Soviet trade mission had suggested that Russia would be only too willing to help build the dam if the U.S. did not. The DLF sent an expert to make a study. He reported tnat the Tunisians were right: there was enough underground water. Last week DLF announced that it would lend Tunisia $18 million, enough to assure the building of the dam and the drilling of 15 ground wells.

The dam, to be completed in 1965, will irrigate 11,000 acres, is expected to yield an extra $4,000,000 worth of crops each year. Above all, it promises to help insure social stability in a land whose poverty works against stability.