With poor rains, fuel shortages and high fertilizer prices, farmers in northeastern Syria are facing a bad year as a disappointing wheat crop looks set to deal another blow to food supplies in a country reeling from climate change and war.
Farmer Muhammed Hussein said he has planted regarding a fifth of the area he usually cultivates this season due to difficulties exacerbated by high global fertilizer prices, a side effect of the Ukraine war.
Hussein, 46, added, “We suffer from a shortage of diesel fuel, which is an expensive fertilizer.” He was complaining regarding his condition as the harvesting machine made its way through a wheat field behind him in a village near the city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria.
Northeast Syria is vital to the country’s grain production, but the Kurdish-led authorities that control the region do not expect this year’s crop to meet their region’s needs, let alone supply other parts of the country.
This darkens the picture of Syrian wheat production, which has declined since the outbreak of war in 2011, raising concerns regarding food security in a country where the United Nations says needs have reached unprecedented levels.
Omran Reda, the United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Syria, told Archyde.com that initial indications herald another bad agricultural season following the fall of the 2021 crop.
As happened to last season’s crop, Reda said that the harvest was affected by the delay in the onset of rains, long seasonal droughts, and an early interruption of rain, which had devastating effects.
Crops have also been affected by climatic changes including frost and sharp rise in temperatures.
“Food costs have risen dramatically, production and supplies have fallen, and the indicators for the next season’s harvest are worrying. We are very concerned regarding the overall food security situation,” said Reda.
From blessing to burden
Syria’s grain production has fallen from an annual average of 4.1 million tons before the crisis, which was enough to meet domestic demand, to an estimated 1.05 million tons in 2021, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Production in 2020 was regarding 2.8 million tons.
While wheat imports from Russia, an ally of the Syrian government, have filled something in the gap, food insecurity across the fractured country is more acute than at any time since the war began, due to factors including the collapse of the Syrian pound.
The World Food Program says 12.4 million Syrians, or nearly 70 percent of the country’s population, are food insecure.
So far, 379,000 tons of wheat have been harvested this year in the region, said Nabila Mohamed, head of the Kurdish-led Agricultural Community Development Authority that runs the northeast.
The expected quantity is 450,000 tons, which is less than 600,000 tons, which Nabila Muhammad said is necessary to meet the needs of the region, which means that there will be no surplus to supply areas controlled by the Syrian government.
She explained that last year there was little rain and this year it rained, but not at the right time for planting. She added that the Ukrainian war also affected farmers with the high prices of imported fertilizers.
She added that a small area was harvested from areas that depend on rain-fed agriculture, while the crop mostly depends on irrigated land. She pointed out that this year’s harvest in the northeast was better than last year due to the issuance of more licenses to drill wells.
The FAO said that farmers in areas that depend on rain-fed agriculture in Syria lost most of their crops for the second year in a row.
Muhammad Ahmed, 65, complained that he had suffered heavy losses due to the drought, describing his land as a burden rather than a benefit.
He said that the land had caused him losses for two consecutive years, adding that shepherds were allowed to graze their livestock there.