Conflict and climate change ravage Syria’s agricultural heartland

At a government bakery in Hasaka, Syria, a faded image of former President Hafez al-Assad looms over the aging machinery and clanging steel chains of the assembly line. The painting dates from long before the war, when this region of northeast Syria was still under government control.
Outside, a long line of families and disabled men wait for bags of subsidised flat bread, which sells at about one-quarter of the market price.
What is new at this bakery is the colour of the flour dumped into giant mixing bowls: It is now pale yellow instead of the traditional stark white.
“This is a new experiment we started three or four months ago,” said Media Sheko, a manager of the bakery. “To avoid bread shortages, we had to mix it with corn.”
People wait outside the government bakery, which sells flat bread at about a quarter of the price of bread from private bakeries in Hasaka, Syria. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)
In a region ravaged the Islamic State group and armed conflict, prolonged drought and drying rivers have made stability even more precarious. Here, the normally abstract idea of climate change can be seen in the city’s daily bread.
The prolonged drought in the region has been linked to climate change worldwide. But in northeast Syria, the country’s horic breadbasket, its effects have been compounded more than a decade of war, a devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty, leaving a vulnerable society even more at risk of destabilisation.
Across Syria, the UN’s World Food Program reported last summer that almost half of the population did not have enough food, a figure expected to rise higher this year.
Many of the fields of red earth have been left fallow farmers who can no longer afford to buy seeds, fertilizer or diesel to run water pumps to replace the low rainfall of previous years. The wheat they do grow is lower quality and sells for much less than before the current drought two years ago, according to farmers, government officials and aid organisations.
This semiautonomous breakaway region in northeastern Syria, desperate for cash and stable relations with Damascus, still sells much of its wheat crop to the Syrian government, leaving little for its own population.
And farmers who cannot afford to feed and water their animals are selling them off at cut-rate prices.
The US space agency NASA, which studies climate change, says the drought that began in 1998 is the worst that some parts of the Middle East have seen in nine centuries.