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Worsening year by year - Drought hits Syria badly

Syria (Al-Hasakeh) With the support of the EU, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has started distributing emergency food assistance to almost 200,000 people in the rural northeast of Syria, where the drought of 2009 has severely affected small-scale farmers and herding families.

Global Arab Network has received EU Delegation press release which said that the donations from the European Commission Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO) as well as other organizations and countries, will support WFP to provide families with a two-month food ration that includes rice, bulgur, oil, wheat flour, chickpeas and salt. The UN food agency has so far received US$8.2 million out of the required US$22 million needed to provide food assistance to up to 300,000 people.

In addition, the WFP will start distributing supplementary feeding rations to children under five, and to pregnant and nursing mothers in Al-Shadadi district of Al-Hasakeh, one of the worst-affected areas with the highest rate of migration and school closures.

Drought in eastern and northeastern Syria has driven some 300,000 families to urban settlements such as Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez Zour in search of work in one of the largest internal displacements in the Middle East in recent years, according to IRIN (a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) .

The country’s agriculture sector, which until recently employed 40 percent of Syria’s workforce and accounted for 25 percent of gross domestic product, has been hit badly, but farmers themselves are worst affected, say aid officials.

In some villages, up to 50 percent of the population has left for nearby cities.

“Farmers who depend on only one crop are in trouble - they have nothing else to help them and they have to move,” said Abdulla Bin Yehia, a representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Damascus.

Those with livestock have seen the cost of feed rise 75 percent, according to FAO, resulting in the deaths of up to 80 percent of livestock on small and medium-sized farms.

More than one million people, already bordering on the poverty line because of low incomes, have been affected by the drought. Outdated and wasteful irrigation methods used by farmers are also contributing to the problem, experts said.

Syria’s water shortages have been worsening year by year. In 2006, northeastern regions such as Hasakeh and Qameshleh were the first to feel the effects of a lack of rain. Since then, farmers and crop-growers in southern and eastern areas - both east and west of Deir ez Zour, and south of Damascus in Sweida - are now suffering from a major drop in rainfall.

Addressing the issues on 15 February, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Syrian government conducted a training session in the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez Zour to assist emergency food distribution.

In one of a series of meetings of the Syrian Economics Society in Damascus in January, officials for the first time shed light on the extent of the drought in eastern Syria: Almost 60,000 families with 100 cattle or less have lost half their animals and poverty levels stand at 80 percent, according to Khader al-Muhaisen, who spoke on behalf of the Syrian Peasants’ Union.