"The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land," said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). "People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration."
Syria's drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN's drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.
Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria's land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC." (Thanks Bessma)
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"There has been much talk in recent months about the prospect of Syria bolting the Iranian axis and becoming magically transformed into an ally of the West.
Although Syria’s President-for-life Bashar Assad’s daily demonstrations of fealty to his murderous friends has exposed this talk as nothing more than fantasy, it continues to dominate the international discourse on Syria.
In the meantime, Syria’s ongoing real transformation, from a more or less functioning state into an impoverished wasteland, has been ignored.
Today, the country faces the greatest economic catastrophe in its history. The crisis is causing massive malnutrition and displacement for hundreds of thousands of Syrians. These Syrians — some 250,000 mainly Kurdish farmers — have been forced off their farms over the past two years because their lands were reclaimed by the desert.
Today shantytowns have sprung up around major cities such as Damascus. They are filled with internally displaced refugees. Through a cataclysmic combination of irrational agricultural policies embraced by the Ba’athist Assad dynasty for the past 45 years that have eroded the soil, and massive digging of some 420,000 unauthorized wells that have dried out the groundwater aquifers (Reuters is reporting that half the wells were dug illegally), Syria’s regime has done everything in its power to dry up the country. The effects of these demented policies have been exacerbated in recent years by Turkey’s diversion of Syria’s main water source, the Euphrates River, through the construction of dams upstream, and by two years of unrelenting drought. Today, much of Syria’s previously fertile farmland has become wasteland. Former farmers are now destitute day laborers with few prospects for economic recovery.
Imagine if in his country’s moment of peril, instead of clinging to his alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Hamas, Assad were to turn to Israel to help him out of this crisis?
Israel is a world leader in water desalination and recycling. The largest desalination plant in the world is located in Ashkelon. Israeli technology and engineers could help Syria rebuild its water supply.
Israel could also help Syria use whatever water it still has, or is able to produce through desalination and recycling more wisely through drip irrigation — which was invented in Israel. Israel today supplies 50 percent of the international market for drip irrigation. In places like Syria and southern Iraq that are now being dried out by the Turkish dams, irrigation is primitive — often involving nothing more than water trucks pumping water out of the Euphrates and driving it over to fields that are often less than a kilometer away. "
Can Syria Pass ‘Israel Test’?
by Caroline Glick
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