Fertile Crescent turning to dust as drought takes hold

THE farmlands spreading north and east of the Euphrates river were once the bread basket of the region, a vast expanse of golden wheatfields and bucolic sheep herds.

Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the Fertile Crescent - including much of neighbouring Iraq - appears to be turning barren. Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals perish.

Sandstorms have become far more common, and vast tented cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and cities of Syria and Iraq.

"I had 400 acres of wheat, and now it's all desert," said Ahmed Abdullah, 48, a farmer who is living in a ragged tent in the town of Ar Raqqah with his wife and 12 children alongside many other migrants. "We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero - no money, no job, no hope."

The collapse of farmlands - which is as much a matter of human mismanagement as of drought - has become a dire economic challenge and a rising security concern for the Syrian and Iraqi governments, which are growing far more dependent on other countries for food and water.

Syria, which once prided itself on its self-sufficiency and even exported wheat, is now quietly importing it in ever larger amounts. The country's total water resources dropped by half between 2002 and 2008, partly through waste and overuse, scientists and water engineers say.

For Syria, which is running out of oil reserves and struggling to draw foreign investment, the farming crisis is an added vulnerability, in part because it is taking place in the area where its restive Kurdish minority is centred.

Iraq, devastated by war, is now facing a water crisis in both the north and the south that may be unprecedented in its history. Both countries have complained about reduced flow on the Euphrates, thanks to massive upriver dam projects in Turkey that are likely to generate more tension as the water crisis worsens.

The four-year drought in Syria has pushed two to three million people into extreme poverty, according to a survey by the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. Herders in the country's north-east have lost 85 per cent of their livestock, and at least 1.3 million people have been affected, he reported.

An estimated 50,000 more families have migrated from rural areas this year, on top of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled in earlier years, De Schutter said. Syria, with a fast-growing population, has already strained to accommodate more than a million Iraqi refugees in the years since the 2003 invasion."It is ironic: this region is the origin of wheat and barley, and now it is among the biggest importers of these products," said Rami Zurayk, a professor of agricultural and food science at the American University in Beirut.

The drought has become a delicate subject for the Syrian government, which does not give foreign journalists official permission to write about it or grant access to officials in the agriculture ministry. On the road running south from Damascus, displaced farmers and herders can be seen living in tents, but the entrances are closely watched by Syrian security agents, who do not allow journalists in.

Droughts have always taken place here, but "the regional climate is changing in ways that are clearly observable", said Jeannie Sowers, a professor at the University of New Hampshire. "Much of the region is getting hotter and dryer, combined with more intense, erratic rainfall and flooding in some areas. You will have people migrating as a result, and governments are ill-prepared."

The Syrian government has begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem and has developed a national drought plan, though it has not yet been put in place. Poor planning helped create the problem in the first place: Syria spent $15 billion on misguided irrigation projects between 1988 and 2000 with little result. Syria continues to grow cotton and wheat in areas that lack sufficient water - making them more vulnerable to drought - because the government views the ability to produce those crops as a bulwark against foreign dependence.

Illegal water drills can be seen across Syria and Iraq, and underground water tables are dropping at a rate that is "really frightening," said De Schutter.

In Ar Raqqah, many displaced farmers talk about wells running dry, and turning polluted. "My uncle's well used to be 70 metres deep, now it's 130 metres and now the water became salty, so we closed it down," said Khalaf Ayed Tajim, a stocky shepherd and displaced farmer.

In Iraq, 100,000 people had been displaced as of a year ago, according to the UN. More than 70 per cent of the ancient underground aqueducts have dried up and been abandoned in the past five years and, since then, the situation has only worsened.

"We saw whole villages buried in sand," said Zaid al-Ali, an Iraqi-born lecturer who surveyed water and farm conditions in northern Iraq. "Their situation is desperate."