Agriculture in Syria
The sector still accounts for an estimated 26 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and represents a critical safety net for the 6.7 million Syrians – including those internally displaced – who still remain in rural areas.
Industry, commerce, and transportation still depended on farm produce and related agro-business, but agriculture's preeminent position had clearly eroded.
The arc of cultivation from the southwest (and east of the coastal mountains) to the northeast is largely semiarid, having as annual rainfall between 300 and 600 millimeters.
Grass and coarse vegetation suitable for limited grazing grow in part of this arid belt, and the rest is desert of little agricultural value.
The Euphrates is the largest river in Southwest Asia which originated in Turkey, where relatively heavy rain and snowfall provide runoff most of the year.
In addition to Syria, both Turkey and Iraq use dams on the Euphrates for hydroelectric power, water control, storage, and irrigation.
Syrians have long used the Euphrates for irrigation, but, because the major systems were destroyed centuries ago, they now make only limited use of the river's flow.
The dam, located at al-Thawrah, a short distance upriver from the town of Raqqa, is earth fill, 60 meters high and four and a half kilometers long.
In 1978, observers believed that 20,000 to 30,000 hectares of land had been irrigated and that new housing, roads, and farms had been completed for the 8,000 farmers displaced by the creation of Lake Assad.
In 1962, talks on allotment of Euphrates water began and continued sporadically throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, but acrimonious relations between Syria and Iraq hampered final agreements.
In addition, Syria completed a small regulatory dam with three seventy-megawatt turbines approximately twenty- five kilometers downstream from Tabaqah.
French, British, Italian, and Japanese firms, the World Bank, and Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti development assistance funds were deeply involved in financing and implementing these projects.
The government obtained economical results using small impoundments that held winter runoffs to supplement rain-fed cultivation and to provide some summer irrigation.
Drainage investments also will be required to maintain cultivation on some irrigated areas that currently suffer from water logging or excessive salinity.
[4] In 1950 the first Syrian constitution placed a limit on the size of farm holdings, but the necessary implementing legislation was not passed until 1958, after the union of Syria and Egypt.
[5] In 1959, the United Arab Republic was born, a hybrid new state that gathered Syria and Egypt under one national leader, Nasser.
However, many studies have demonstrated that this division was short-sighted and ineffective in Syria as it led to impoverishing the farmers and demolishing Syrian farming eventually.
[16] The former large estates were reduced in size, while the number of small-holdings increased, depopulating the countryside effectively as farmers were not supported anymore by the government and they were not able to sustain continuous cropping.
The degradation of the effective agricultural sector in Syria, including productivity and capacity would be attributed to the national land reforms of 1958, maintained by the Assad regime but seldom meticulously planned economically and financially speaking.
Although state intervention in the agricultural sector increased following the union, the government avoided playing a direct role in cultivation.
Although the bank appeared effective, there was insufficient credit through the 1960s and early 1970s for farmers who did not grow cotton and for long-term loans for such needs as machinery or capital improvements.
An organization for grains set prices, purchased some of the farmers' surplus, and supervised the marketing of the remainder through private dealers.
Some smuggling out of farm products for sale in Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon resulted as well as some black marketing in controlled commodities.
Cooperatives were expected to furnish the organization, techniques, credit, and joint use of machinery to replace and expand the functions supplied by the landowners and managers of the large estates.
In the 1970s, government extension workers and cooperatives strongly urged farmers to rotate cropping in a pattern that would maintain the fertility of the soil and avoid having cultivable fields left fallow.
By 1986 it was not clear how much success cooperatives had achieved in crop rotation or mechanization, but statistics showed an accelerated use of farm equipment by the agricultural sector after the October 1973 War.
The great variation in the amounts and timing of rainfall can immediately cause very substantial shifts in areas planted, yields, and production, but the effect on livestock is less predictable.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the government encouraged greater grain production by providing improved high-yield seeds, raising prices paid to farmers, and urging shifts toward wheat growing on some irrigated land formerly planted in cotton.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the government showed increased interest in improving rain-fed agriculture and acquired funding from the World Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the UN Development Program for a US$76.3 million project to expand food production and raise the standard of living in Daraa and As Suwayda provinces.
The government's goal of expanding and diversifying food production created intense competition for irrigated land and encouraged the practice of double cropping.
