Global IssuesDrought Hits Middle East Farmers, Again
Anxious farmers gather in their field on a warm, clear day in Syria’s arid northern region of Al-Raqqa, near the banks of the Euphrates River. The ground in this corner of the ‘fertile crescent’ is barren, save for a small herd of sheep on the ten-hectare farm.
Traditionally the winter rains start in late October. If the dry spell stretches through December, the staple wheat and lentil crops and their livelihood are a write-off for another consecutive year.
Swathes of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories have all been hit by a devastating drought this fall.
Although a ferocious storm hit the region this past weekend, with snow and rain lashing Syria, farmers remember last year’s winter season, which started well. Then the rains stopped abruptly and extreme weather and diseases like yellow rust set in and decimated the wheat.
'We pray for rain and a good income,' says 22 year-old Issa Sheikh, who along with his brother struggles to cultivate their family’s land. 'Last year the season was very bad. The costs for fertilizer and seeds were high, and we had no yield. We now depend on work in the cities, and have taken loans from friends and the bank.'
For Syria’s northeast governorates of Al-Raqqa, Deir Ezzour and Al-Hassakeh - tucked between the borders of Turkey and Iraq and the centre of the country’s petroleum industry - drought and uneven rainfall has stretched over three consecutive years.
Syria’s leading strategic crops are wheat, barley, sugar beet and cotton. A large wheat exporter, the drought’s impact has now forced the agriculturally self-reliant Syrian government to import the staple to meet local consumption.
Many agricultural experts fault climate change as the primary driving factor. 'This year’s November was a very strange November,' says Mahmoud Solh, head of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), based near the northern city of Aleppo. 'There is a trend in temperature, no doubt about it. You feel there has been an up and down fluctuation in rainfall and temperature, but nothing like what we are facing now.'
After an assessment visit to Syria last September, Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, estimated 1.3 million people are directly impacted by the serial drought - 95 percent of them in the northeast - with 800,000 suffering severely. 'Most affected are small-scale farmers… and small-scale herders, who often lost 80-85 percent of their livestock since 2005,' states his initial report.
'These farmers already went through three years of drought and then to have a fourth year, this is a disaster,' concurs Abdulla Tahir Bin Yehia, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Damascus. 'Their capacity has been depleted. That’s why they need help. A family is eight to ten people in the northeast — that’s a huge number.'
Farmers like Al-Raqqa’s Sheikh brothers have been forced to leave their families and find work further afield, in their case for subsistence wages in construction during the summer in Lebanon, or as day labourers in factories around Aleppo.
According to the UN’s Drought Response Plan published in 2010, by the start of the year 65,000 families had migrated from their villages to Syria’s cities. 'This drastic move has not saved these internally displaced families from further hardship and destitution,' the report says. 'Instead, they have lost their social ties and are often exploited at below-market labour rates. It has also further increased the strain on the limited job market, resources and public services, which were already affected by the presence of approximately one million Iraqi refugees.'
Damascus is a major destination for the migrants, and relies heavily on the Fijieh and Barrada springs to feed its burgeoning and ever-thirsty population. Piped in from the nearby Anti-Lebanon mountain range, the over burdened water supply is affected by decreasing snow melt, pipe leakage, water evaporation, illicit wells and the rapid expansion of illegal housing.
In an interview with IPS, Abdullah Droubi, director for water resources at the Arab League’s Arab Centre for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD) in Syria, points to other causation.
'The climate has not changed - we have this variation all the time. We are feeling the effects through population demand and water mismanagement,' he says, estimating a 3 percent annual growth in Syria’s population, standing roughly at 21 million today.
'Since 1986 we showed that population was a major driving force of this in the Arab region, and this is what is happening now. The government has to make a population planning policy - we cannot stay like this. We don’t have enough resources.'
The Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform and Ministry of Irrigation are working with international water and agriculture specialists on a variety of alternative and sustainable water solutions. But government and donor aid for this impoverished population is hamstrung by a scarcity of funds.
'We believe the complex challenges in the dry areas will require an integrated approach,' says ICARDA’s Solh. He speaks of three major factors: natural resource management including water productivity and efficiency; crop improvement including drought and heat tolerant crops, and resistant to biotic stresses; and socio-economic aspects and institutional support.
Mahmoud el-Ahmad, a farmer in his late thirties, supports a family of nine children in northern Al-Bab. Living off an eight-hectare plot of barley and lentils; he supplements his income ploughing a rich neighbour’s farm. This year he planted seeds with a borrowed ‘zero-tillage’ tractor introduced by ICARDA. The tractor doesn’t churn the earth when planting seeds, thus preserving the earth’s moisture. El-Ahmad made 4,000 dollars last year for his entire crop, and hopes he can save an additional 20 dollars per hectare with the new tilling method.
But most of his friends are working in factories or in Lebanon, he says. 'The land cannot feed the families, everyone has to go look for another job.'
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service