Drought adds to Syria woes of poverty and unemployment

By MICHAEL JANSEN in Damascus 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 Times that “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-Baath reported 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. …

Drought adds to Syrian woes of poverty and unemployment