The bottled water shelf emptied in July. Everyone who names a culprit names the distribution stage
Bottled water was hard to find in Tunisian shops from late July, and where it was on sale the price had risen. The producers' chamber blames distributors, wholesalers and retailers. The Consumer Defence Organisation blames speculators and middlemen. The commerce ministry names no cause; it says it seized more than 147,000 litres between mid-July and early August. The Tunisian Water Observatory spent the same month counting something else: 608 reports of disrupted water supply.
Where they agree
The producers' chamber and the Consumer Defence Organisation describe the same shop: water hard to find from late July, and a higher price where it was found. Both place the culprit in the stages after the plant.
Where they split
The culprits do not match: distributors and traders for the chamber, speculators and middlemen for the consumer organisation, no one at all for the ministry, and for the observatory the mains rather than the bottle. And the dates never test each other: the ministry's seizure figures stop at the start of August, so they neither confirm nor contradict the chamber's 8 August all-clear.
What nobody is saying
No one connects the two waters. The observatory counts failures of the drinking water network; the chamber explains the bottled shortage by the power cuts at the plants; nobody says whether the taps going dry is what sends people to the shelf. And no one puts a number on the price rise itself, in dinars or in percent.
He says producers have not raised their prices; the increases, he says, come from distributors and from wholesale and retail traders. Repeated power cuts had been disrupting production at the bottling plants. On 8 August he said supply was back to its normal rhythm, with temperatures down and electricity to the factories steady, and he called on the commerce ministry's control brigades to stop the illegal increases.
She says the organisation has received several complaints: bottled water missing from the shops, and higher prices where it is found. The shortage, she says, is no excuse for the increases; she blames speculators and middlemen. Her advice to consumers is practical: shop in the regular, legal outlets, check the displayed price against the price charged, and report unjustified increases to the organisation or to the economic control services.
The ministry does not explain the shortage; it answers with enforcement. Working with the security services, its control units seized more than 147,000 litres of bottled water between mid-July and early August, in daily inspections of the sector, and legal action has begun against the offenders. The grounds it gives: violations of the rules on transparent dealings and prices. Where in the chain the water was seized, it does not say.
The observatory puts the problem in the tap, not in the bottle. In July it logged 608 reports of disrupted water supply, the highest monthly count since the start of 2026; 549 of them concerned unannounced cut-offs and disruption to drinking water distribution. Tunisia, it says, has entered a critical phase of water emergency. Protests linked to water rose from 23 in June to 34 in July, and the reports now cluster on the coast and in the tourist areas, with Nabeul first at 65.