SYRIA IS sweltering in an unseasonable heatwave which Damascenes are blaming on climate change. “We have to fight global warming now, as well as so many other battles,” asserted Zuhair, an academic.
Battle was joined in 2007 when the rains failed and 40,000 farm families in the country’s northeastern breadbasket began to migrate to Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s main cities, to take up low-paying, unskilled jobs.
In the drought-affected villages, “there are 800,000 people in need”, stated Muhannad Hadi, country director of the World Food Programme (WFP), “500,000 covered by the government and 300,000 by the WFP”. The agency has been able to help only 190,000 because of a shortfall in funding. WFP made two distributions of two-month parcels containing flour, bulgur, oil, rice, chickpeas and salt, and is set to make a third in early July. “Ireland’s donation of $900,000 [€730,000] covered the needs of 50,000 people,” he stated.
Although last season's rain was reasonably good and improved the situation in the farming sector, Dr Abdullah Dardari, deputy prime minister for economic affairs, told The Irish Timesthat "the impact of poverty cannot be reversed in one year. So we need to work hard now on relocation of the displaced people back to their homes and ensuring that they have a sustainable livelihood."
He noted that the million people who normally dwell in the northeast have been affected to different degrees. Some “were severely impacted and [others] were mildly impacted, there were people who had to move and there are people who stayed at home. Don’t forget that we did provide hundreds of thousands of food rations and a lot of financial assistance and support to the agricultural sector . . . so we managed to mitigate the impact relatively well.” Besides providing sustenance, the government responded by rescheduling loans and offering tax incentives to investors.
The ruling party's newspaper al-Baathreported that wheat production decreased this year to 2.4 million tonnes, a fall from 4.1 million in 2007. Domestic consumption has risen to four million tonnes, forcing Syria, which had been an exporter, to import wheat for three years in succession.
Dr Dardari said the drought had harmed Syria’s reform pro- gramme by derailing some of the projects designed to alleviate poverty and unemployment. “It meant that the overall growth numbers for 2008 went down to around 5.4 per cent, rather than more than 6 per cent.” This was accounted for by a 22 per cent fall in agricultural production during 2008, since this sector represents 24 per cent of gross domestic product. He said: “Thank God that other sectors of the economy were growing very strongly. In 2009 the deterioration in agriculture halted . . . and that helped to [reduce] the negative impact of the international financial crisis on the economy, which meant a growth rate of 5.6-5.8 per cent.”
Dr Dardari announced on Saturday that public investment in the city of Deir al-Zor will be doubled to $450 million over the next five years, and called on the private sector to match this sum. He said Syria and Turkey had agreed to build a $1.25 billion dam on the Orontes river, which will irrigate 30,000 hectares of land in the Deir al-Zor region. This project will take 10 years.
There is pressure on farmers in the driest areas to shift to crops which need less water than wheat and cotton, which they have been growing for centuries. Alternatives include olives, almonds and pistachios, which also will secure for farmers a far better income, and enable them to better weather climate change. But getting them to co-operate is a difficult and delicate task.