Severe Drought + Famine Warning in Eastern Syria

Image Source: USDA Commodity Intelligence Report

The National reports on what appear to be serious conditions in eastern Syrian:

Already struggling to recover from one of the country’s worst droughts on record, Syria’s agricultural sector has been dealt another blow, with up to one-third of its wheat crop damaged by a virulent disease.

Yellow Rust infections have been “significant” in Syria’s breadbasket eastern region, according to farmers and officials. With harvests now being collected, they warned that production of soft wheat could be cut by half compared with last year.

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“It has come at a difficult time,” he said. “There have also been cuts in subsidies on fuel and fertilizer. Many farmers have gone out of business.”

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In Syria, wheat is broadly classified as either hard or soft, the former used for production of pasta while soft wheat is used for bread. ...

With the Syrian economy heavily dependent on agriculture, the government has set up a committee to evaluate the problem and to troubleshoot the situation. ...

Virulent new forms of Yellow Rust have hit wheat crops across the globe, with devastating effects in some African countries, where up to 90 per cent of harvests have been wiped out. ...

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It represents another setback for farmers in Syria’s Jazeera region and comes at a time when emergency aid donated by the international community is still being sent out to drought-ravaged areas.

The United Nations this week began distributing food packages to 200,000 people in Raqqa, Hasika and Deir Ezzor in an effort to prevent serious malnutrition.

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The [UN's World Food Program] WFP has identified 300,000 people as being in need of a two-month supply of emergency food aid, but it has only received funding sufficient for only 190,000.

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One farm worker in Raqqa, who asked not to be named, complained that he and his family were in a dire situation and literally had nothing to left to eat.

“We’re starving out here; we’re poor, there’s no money, no food and we’ve had no help,” he said.

Water shortages in 2008 and 2009 hit the region hard. Studies have shown that 70 per cent of livestock was wiped out by the drought because it was impossible to grow animal fodder. Wheat production in 2008 dropped to 1.3 million tonnes from 2.4m tonnes the previous year.

The crisis has forced hundreds of thousands of people off the land, with many living as refugees around Damascus, Aleppo and Dera in southern Syria. Many have fled the country entirely, looking for work in neighboring Lebanon.

... Last month, Kuwait agreed to fund a project to improve irrigation in some of the worst-hit regions, while the Syrian authorities are pushing through long-term reforms to improve agricultural efficiency.

Damascus has firmly put the blame for the drought on global warming, but some Syrian agricultural experts have said poor government management of water resources and inappropriate farming are the real underlying reasons.

As part of a national food security policy, wheat in Syria was heavily subsidized for decades despite being water-intensive, encouraging farmers to dig illegal wells that have dried up ground-water supplies. Those subsidies have been stopped but the environmental damage caused by excessive water extraction is likely to take decades to repair, even if rainfall is consistent.

Readers can also refer to the FAO Syria Drought Emergency site for more details.