AMMAN: The “year of wheat” campaign pushed by Syrian President Bashar al Assad is in jeopardy after low rainfall risked leaving an import gap of at least 1.5 million tonnes, according to preliminary estimates by officials and experts.
The agricultural blow and lack of funds to finance the imports will add to pressure on a Syrian economy already reeling from ten years of conflict and buckling under the pressure of US sanctions, neighbouring Lebanon’s financial collapse and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Russia, one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat and Assad’s staunch ally, has said it would sell one million tonnes of grain to Syria throughout the year to help it meet the four million tonnes of annual domestic demand.
But its cargoes have been slow to arrive in recent years as funds grew scarce, with publicly available customs data showing no significant supplies to Syria.
Officials and an expert at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated at least 1.5 million tonnes of wheat imports were needed. They said a 1.2 million-tonne government purchasing target, driven by forced sales to the government, now looked wildly unrealistic.
Abdullah Khader, 49, a landowner and farmer in Raqqa province, said the lack of rain meant his crop was almost a quarter of last year’s.
Minister of Agriculture Mohammed Hassan Qatana talked about the fate of the domestic crop during a tour with his team this week of the country’s bread basket in the northeast Hasaka province, where much of the country’s cereals crop is in the hands of breakaway Kurds.
“It’s clear from the tour the huge impact of the climatic changes, that all rain-fed plantations have been taken out of investments and even the irrigated wheat areas production has gone down 50-70 per cent’’, Qatana said. — Reuters
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