Measuring agricultural production

Key Takeaways

• The extent of agricultural production has decreased during the 2022 growing season in areas under the control of the Autonomous Administration in northeast Syria:

  ◊ Compared to previous non-drought seasons, agricultural production decreased significantly: by 82% compared to the 2020 growing season and 84% compared to the 2019 growing season.

  ◊ Compared to previous drought seasons production has also decreased by 27% compared to the 2021 growing season and 29% compared to the 2018 growing season.

• There was less rain and groundwater-fed agricultural land in the 2022 winter growing season than in the previous four winter seasons, but the vitality of the cultivated land decreased at a slower rate,

  indicating that resilient farmland has become more intensively cultivated.

• Cultivation has expanded in some areas relative to non-drought seasons, most notably along the Euphrates in southern Deir-ez-Zor.

• Drought coping mechanisms include delays in sowing seeds to preserve seed moisture, selling or renting farmland, and drilling deeper or new surface wells and boreholes. Drilling is prohibitively expensive for most farmers, both for the machinery needed, and the cost of imported parts and fuel needed for maintenance and pumping.

• Relative to the 2018 and 2021 drought seasons, cultivation has expanded around Rweished (west of Al-Suwar) and in the northern portions of Qamishli, Ras al Ain and Ain al Arab districts.

• Agricultural production diminished the most during the past two drought seasons in arid climates with soils that have limited moisture retention capacities.

• Food, water and livelihood priority needs increased at a lower rate in communities where agriculture was generally more resilient to drought, and increased more in communities with lower or lost agricultural

  production.

• Humanitarian actors working in food security should consider the following:

  ◊ Optimizing viable arable land by targeting areas where agricultural production has remained resilient or expanded despite drought conditions.

  ◊ Continuing to provide more efficient irrigation technologies (eg, drip irrigation).

  ◊ Piloting alternative agricultural solutions in areas where cultivation has drastically decreased due to the drought, such as drought-resilient plant varieties for grazing.

  ◊ Advocating for groundwater conservation policies to the Autonomous Administration to slow down groundwater abstraction, which increases when rainfall levels are low.

  introduction

  In 2021, northeast Syria experienced significantly below-average rainfall, causing the worst drought in approximately 70 years. Water levels of the Euphrates flowing through northeast Syria have been significantly reduced, as the Turkish government has been accused of hydro-politics; that is, increasingly diverting water through infrastructure projects within Turkey that disrupt water flows into Syria, specifically to the Tishreen and Taqba dams, and, on a smaller scale, blocking water pumping from the Alouk water station near Menbij into Al-Hasakeh. Turkish water management – as well as additional factors related to the Syrian conflict such as scarcity in commodities and inputs – has lowered the quantity and quality of drinking water and hydroelectric power generated from dams operated along the river within Syria. As a result of these changes, agricultural crop production has significantly declined, while at the same time, access to safe drinking and agricultural water has become a critical issue across northeast Syria.

  The region has also been particularly susceptible to drought – groundwater over-extraction has been a problem since 1985, when the Syrian government began a policy of subsidizing agricultural inputs and providing low-interest loans and facilitating the acquisition of permits to drill groundwater wells to farmers that agreed to sell specified quantities of their harvests to the government. This further propelled the northeast into a center of agricultural production, increased the number of groundwater wells by 134% (53,000 to 124,000) and expanded the amount of irrigated land by 127% between 1988 and 1994. The number of wells continued to increase, leading to groundwater-based agriculture comprising about half of the total irrigated land in 2010; but the amount of irrigated land had plateaued in 2005, signaling a lower groundwater well productivity and a drop in the groundwater supply, which then required farmers to deepen wells. Since taking control of the region, the Autonomous Administration has continued the policy of agricultural input subsidies, however, their application has been inconsistent and unreliable.

  Irrigated farming is particularly vulnerable to drought and insufficient provision of subsided inputs. Groundwater levels drop faster during droughts due to reduced recharge rates and the increased amount of abstraction needed to compensate for the lower rainfall levels, which eventually deplete wells or necessitate the deepening of wells. Insufficient quantities of subsidized diesel increases the cost of irrigation, particularly during droughts, because water pumps must be operated longer and more intensively to pump water from the lower depth of deepened wells. Additionally, the depreciation of the Syrian pound over the past two years has increased the price of agricultural inputs; for example, fertilizer and mechanical parts are increasingly unaffordable while higher fuel prices and seed availability issues have reduced the ability of farmers to plant, grow, and harvest their crops. These factors combined to reduce overall agricultural production, evident in the drought-stricken 2021 growing season, with an approximately 75% reduction in rainfed crop yield in Al-Hasakeh governorate, and a 25% reduction in irrigated yields across the whole of the northeast.

  Purpose of the study

  The central analysis of this research measures the level of agricultural production in northeast Syria in the 2022 winter growing season and the previous four seasons. Agricultural production was measured using remote sensing vegetation indices calculated from Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite images. Images captured near the end of the growing season (within two weeks of 15 April) were obtained from 2018 to 2022. The entirety of land controlled by the Autonomous Administration was divided into grid areas that were classified according to several aggregations:

  1. Agricultural water source; including farmland near rivers or canals, and ‘land’; that is, farms located far from the water sources and reliant on rainfall or irrigation from groundwater.

  2. Combinations of Köppen climate zone (hot, arid or Mediterranean) and soil type (eg, complex, nutrient-rich, shallow).

  3. Agricultural stability zones, are mainly based on average annual rainfall levels.

  Each of these aggregations offer insight into where and why agricultural production has declined more or less relative to past seasons due to the ongoing drought. This was achieved by identifying areas of agricultural production using satellite imagery from the 2018 to 2022 growing seasons and explaining the spatial dynamics of changes in production.

  Potential areas of intervention for development and humanitarian programming, and for policy were identified from the results of the analysis; specifically, areas where agricultural activity has expanded, but is relatively less irrigated.

  This paper concludes that groundwater abstraction is generally the solution, and has been the main coping mechanism, to drought or low-rainfall seasons; farmers in northeast Syria should therefore adopt more efficient irrigation techniques to ensure sustainability. Programming should also focus on cash and in-kind assistance to farmers to compensate for the Autonomous Administration’s insufficient distribution of subsidized seeds, fertilizer, and diesel, which are needed to maintain profitability. These interventions, in combination with the gradual implementation of policies focused on sustainability utilizing groundwater resources, offer northeast Syria a conceivable path to agricultural resilience in Syria despite past, present, and inevitably future drought conditions.