Peter
Schwartzstein

published on PAX on Feb 16, 2022

read on original website

'We Fear More War. We Fear More Drought.'

How climate and conflict are fragmenting rural Syria

The summer of 2021 brought unprecedented difficulties for rural communities in northeast Syria as severe drought combined with new and dangerous turns in the conflict to pitch them even deeper into poverty. Across this part of the country, many livestock herds halved in size – or worse. Farmers registered drops in crop yields of up to 90 percent, if they produced anything at all. Amid soaring food prices and services and quality of life that are deteriorating in lockstep with the area’s enormous agricultural and pastoralism sectors, few rural – or even urban –Syrians in the northeast have been spared the fallout from these troubles.

Much of this crisis is an extension of historic or ongoing conflict-related woes. Syrian pastoralists and farmers are accustomed to drought, albeit not ones that are coming more regularly and severely than ever due to climate change. After more than 10 years of fighting, many of these men and women are also at least partly hardened to the trials of a wartime economy in which they must scrap, hustle, and frequently adjust to distant developments in order to survive.

Seen from a pastoralist perspective, these are, arguably, just the latest aggravations in a century of turmoil, in which their numbers have fallen to two or three percent of the population, down from around 13 percent in the 1930s, and in which their nomadic, semi-nomadic, and traditional border-crossing ways have made them sources of suspicion to authorities in Damascus and other regional capitals.Even before the war, they were among the poorest and most marginalised of rural people. Some pastoralists harbour grievances against the state and farmers for its long time reinforcement of agriculture at their expense and for the lack of support as their livelihoods have collapsed due to climate and development pressures.

But in arriving concurrently, last year’s fusion of feeble rainfall, heightened violence around northeast Syria, and a worsening macro-economic outlook has exhausted some of these communities’ few remaining coping mechanisms at their time of greatest desperation. Taken in isolation each calamity might have been manageable, yet together they overwhelmed whatever resilience many people have left.

With little money and soaring import costs because of the continued collapse of the Syrian pound, now some 80 times weaker against the dollar than it was pre-war, farmers have been unable to afford or source quality seeds or fertilisers or diesel to man their pumps for irrigation as they previously did during drought. Vast tracts of prime farmland are sitting fallow as a consequence, which is fueling food insecurity and depriving pastoralists of affordable fodder. Local production of barley, a vital crop staple, is down by more than a million tons, in large part due to rainfall that has shrunk by a third in places. And with intensifying instability as the so-called Islamic State (IS) and other armed actors regroup along the northeast’ semi-arid periphery, pastoralists (also known as herders) have lost access to vital grazing land and markets.