From 2006-2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced, in the
terms of one expert,
“the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures
since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many
millennia ago.”
According to a special case study from last year’s
Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR),
of
the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in
the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), “nearly
75 percent … suffered total crop failure.” Herders in the northeast
lost around 85% of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.
The human and economic costs are enormous. In 2009, the
UN and IFRC reported that over 800,000 Syrians had lost their entire livelihood as a result of the droughts. By 2011, the aforementioned
GAR report
estimated that the number of Syrians who were left extremely “food
insecure” by the droughts sat at about one million. The number of people
driven into extreme poverty is even worse, with a
UN report from last year estimating two to three million people affected.
This has led to a massive
exodus of farmers, herders and agriculturally-dependent rural families from the countryside to the cities. Last January, it was
reported
that crop failures (particularly the Halaby pepper) just in the farming
villages around the city of Aleppo, had led “200,000 rural villagers
to leave for the cities.” In October 2010, the
New York Times highlighted
a UN estimate that 50,000 families migrated from rural areas just that
year, “on top of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled in
earlier years.” In context of Syrian cities coping with influxes of
Iraqi refugees
since the U.S. invasion in 2003, this has placed additional strains and
tensions on an already stressed and disenfranchised population.
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