Worst Drought in Decades Threatens Syria’s Post-War Recovery
The Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East are grappling with the worst drought in decades, a crisis that is hitting Syria particularly hard as the country struggles to recover from a 14-year civil war. The drought has led to dried-up rivers and lakes, shriveled crops, and water cutoffs in major cities.
According to a report by The Associated Press, the situation is especially dire for Syrian farmers who were already financially strained by the war. Jalal Al Hamoud, a national food security officer for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Syria, stated that farmers have little ability to cope with the drought’s effects. One such farmer, Mansour Mahmoud Al-Khatib, told the AP that the drought has devastated his farm, drying up the wells he uses for irrigation. While his land could typically produce up to 900 kilograms of wheat per dunam in a good year, this season’s yield was only about a quarter of that.
The drought is significantly impacting the nation’s food security. Before the war, Syria produced an average of 3.5 to 4.5 million tons of wheat annually, enough for domestic needs. This dropped to 2.2 to 2.6 million tons during the conflict, forcing the government to import 60% to 70% of its wheat. This year’s harvest is expected to yield only 1 million tons, which will last just two or three months, according to Mudar Dayoub, a spokesperson for Syria’s Ministry of Internal Trade and Consumer Protection. This forces the country to rely even more heavily on imports and aid, a situation that Saeed Ibrahim, director of agricultural planning and economics in Syria’s Agriculture Ministry, warned is “unsustainable.”
The drought’s effects extend beyond Syria’s borders. In neighboring Lebanon, a dam on the Litani River forms Lake Qaraoun, which has shrunk to the size of a pond due to an unusually dry winter. The head of the Litani River National Authority, Sami Alawieh, said that water flowing into the reservoir was drastically reduced this year, which has in turn exacerbated the drought in Syria, particularly in provinces like Idlib, which rely on rivers from Lebanon.
Experts agree that Syria and the broader region are heading toward more severe climate shocks, which they are ill-prepared to handle. Matti Kummu, a professor at Aalto University in Finland, noted that the Middle East is among the regions that are drying out, with Syria showing a trend of reduced rainfall over the last 40 years. He warned that the country is using water at an unsustainable rate and that groundwater levels are consistently dropping, raising questions about how much of the croplands will remain arable in the coming decades.
