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The book of Proverbs says that "He that troubleth his own house shall
inherit the wind". That would apply in spades to the Baathist dictator.
Due to unwise agricultural policies and climate change, Syria is facing
an even grimmer outlook than when this article was written. I have read
scholarly articles predicting that Damascus will run dry as early as 5
years from now. The vainglorious blustering of the Damascus dictatorship
will be starkly at odds with the dystopian future of a country that will
have to rely on the diminished wealth of its oil-exporting benefactors
in Russia and Iran. You'll note that this article was filed from Raqqa,
the epicenter of Syria's collapse into sectarian madness.
The International Herald Tribune
October 14, 2010 Thursday
Once a breadbasket, now a barren land;
Drought strikes region covering Syria and Iraq, bringing deep poverty
BY ROBERT F. WORTH
Al RAQQA, Syria
The farmlands spreading north and east of this Euphrates River town were
once the breadbasket of the region, a vast expanse of golden wheat
fields and bucolic sheep herds.
Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the
Fertile Crescent - including much of Iraq - appears to be turning
barren, climate scientists say.
Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed; underground water sources
have run dry, and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farm
fields turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off. Sandstorms
have become far more common, and vast tent cities of dispossessed
farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and
cities of Syria and Iraq.
''I had 400 acres of wheat, and now it's all desert,'' said Ahmed
Abdullah, a 48-year-old farmer who is living in a ragged burlap and
plastic tent here with his wife and 12 children alongside many other
migrants. ''We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero - no
money, no job, no hope.''
The collapse of farmlands here - which is as much a matter of human
mismanagement as of drought - has become a dire economic challenge and a
rising security concern for the Syrian and Iraqi governments. They are
now growing far more dependent on other countries for food and water.
Syria, which once prided itself on its self-sufficiency and even
exported wheat, is now quietly importing it in ever-larger amounts. The
country's total water resources dropped by half from 2002 to 2008,
according to scientists and water engineers.
For Syria, which is running out of oil reserves and struggling to draw
foreign investment, the farming crisis is an added vulnerability in part
because it is taking place in the area where the country's restive
Kurdish minority is centered. Iraq, devastated by war, is now facing a
water crisis that may be unprecedented in its history. Both countries
have complained about reduced flow on the Euphrates, because of massive
upriver dam projects in Turkey.
The four-year drought in Syria has pushed two million to three million
people into extreme poverty, according to a survey completed this month
by the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier
De Schutter.
Herders in the country's northeast have lost 85 percent of their
livestock, and at least 1.3 million people have been affected, he
reported. An estimated 50,000 more families have migrated from rural
areas this year, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of people who
fled in earlier years, Mr. DeSchutter said.
Syria, with a fast-growing population, has already strained to
accommodate more than a million Iraqi refugees in the years since the
2003 invasion.
''It is ironic, this region is the origin of wheat and barley, and now
it is among the biggest importers of these products,'' said Rami Zurayk,
a professor of agricultural and food science at the American University
in Beirut.
The drought has become a sensitive subject for the Syrian government,
which does not give foreign journalists official permission to write
about it and refuses access to officials in the Agriculture Ministry. On
the road running south from Damascus, displaced farmers and herders can
be seen living in tents, but the entrances are closely watched by Syrian
security agents, who do not allow journalists in.
Droughts have always taken place here, but ''the regional climate is
changing in ways that are clearly observable,'' said Jeannie Sowers, a
professor at the University of New Hampshire who has written on Middle
East climate issues. ''Whether you call it human-induced climate change
or not, much of the region is getting hotter and drier, combined with
more intense, erratic rainfall and flooding in some areas. You will have
people migrating as a result, and governments are ill prepared to take
adaptive measures.''
The Syrian government has begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem
and has developed a national drought plan, though it has not yet been
implemented, analysts say.
Poor government planning helped create the problem: Syria spent $15
billion on misguided irrigation projects from 1988 to 2000 with little
result, said Elie Elhadj, a Syrian-born author who wrote his doctoral
dissertation on the topic. Syria continues to grow cotton and wheat in
areas that lack sufficient water - making it more vulnerable to drought
- because the government views the ability to produce those crops as
part of its identity and a bulwark against foreign dependence, analysts say.
Illegal water drills can be seen across Syria and Iraq, and underground
water tables are dropping at a rate that is ''really frightening,'' said
Mr. DeSchutter, the U.N. expert. There are no reliable nationwide
statistics, and some analysts and Western diplomats say they believe
that the Syrian government is not measuring them.
Corruption and failed administration are often to blame. ''A lot of
powerful people don't abide by the regulations and nobody can tame
them,'' said Nabil Sukkar, an analyst in Damascus.
Here in Al Raqqa, many displaced farmers talk about wells running dry or
becoming so polluted that they must be shut down.
''My uncle's well used to be 70 meters deep, now it's 130 meters and now
the water became salty, so we closed it down,'' said Khalaf Ayed Tajim,
a sheep herder and farmer who heads a local collective for displaced
northerners. He left his village near here when half of his herd died
and his fields dried up. Now he lives in a concrete bunker with his 17
children, two wives, and his mother.
In Iraq, 100,000 people had been displaced by drought as of a year ago,
according to a U.N. report. More than 70 percent of the ancient
underground aqueducts known as karez have dried up and been abandoned in
the past five years, the report said. Since then, the situation has only
worsened.
''We saw whole villages buried in sand,'' said Zaid al Ali, an
Iraqi-born lecturer at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris who
returned in August from a survey of water and farm conditions in the
northern Iraqi provinces of Kirkuk and Salahuddin. ''Their situation is
desperate. Everywhere you can see sand encroaching on what was pasture
land.''
Southern Iraq has seen similar farming collapses, with reduced river
flow from the Euphrates and the drying up of the once-vast marshes.
Syrian officials say they expect to get help from Turkey, which is rich
and water and has recently become a close ally after years of frosty
relations. But it may be too late to save the abandoned villages of
northern Syria and Iraq.
''At first, the migrations were temporary, but after three or four
years, these people will not come back,'' said Abdullah Yahia bin Tahir,
the Damascus representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
''Back in the village, our houses are covered in dust, it's as if they'd
been destroyed,'' said Mr. Tajim, the farmer who moved here two years
ago. ''We would love to go back, but how?''
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