Standing on the cracked soil of pale wheat fields near the decimated city of Deir ez-Zor, farmer Ahmed al-Azzeh surveys what remains of a ruined season.
Scattered mounds of harvested grain punctuate parched stretches of earth. From the animal pen by his rented house comes the subdued bleating of sheep that, like the land, are visibly undernourished. The scent of slaughter lingers in the air.
“Both my sheep and my fields are suffering from the drought,” says Mr. Azzeh. “The season is destroyed.”
Why We Wrote This
One of the biggest challenges to rebuilding Syria may prove to be environmental. Years of drought causing crop yields to fall dramatically are compounded by the dearth of post-war resources to address the problem.
Once a cornerstone of the country’s wheat production, the Deir ez-Zor region now stands as a stark example of how war, climate stress, and institutional neglect can unravel rural life. Years of worsening drought have pushed large swaths of Syria’s farmland to the edge of collapse. The Euphrates River – long a lifeline for local agriculture – has receded dramatically, leaving irrigation canals dry and livelihoods in peril.
That has left farmers like Mr. Azzeh struggling to make ends meet – and left Syria trying to find a way to rebuild its once bountiful food production amid its post-civil war rubble.
Little water amid a war
Farmers in the Deir ez-Zor region grow durum wheat, soft wheat, and barley, all of which depend heavily on irrigation. Most of their crop is sold to the Syrian government and Arab traders, and occasionally to Kurdish buyers in the semi-autonomous northeast. Those who can do so supplement their income with livestock sales.
Mr. Azzeh’s year-on-year sales figures are grim, but convey the big picture. His wheat yield has dropped to just 50 kilograms per dunum (quarter acre) this year. That’s a sixth of last season’s harvest. It means he’ll see only 1,100 pounds of wheat from his entire 10-dunum plot (about 2.5 acres), or roughly 8 bushels per acre, far below typical yields in the United States.
His livestock income has collapsed as well. Last year, he was able to sell 50 animals for 3 million Syrian pounds each. This year he sold only 40 heads and for less than a third of that price. “Nobody bought the newborns because they are too skinny,” he explains. “And prices crashed due to Syrian-pounds-to-dollar currency fluctuations.”
As drought deepens and fodder prices soar, Mr. Azzeh is among many herders who say they can’t even afford alaf – wheat-based animal feed. Access to pasture is dangerous. Feeding the animals on nutritious but rare grasses sprouting in the adjoining, steppe- and desert-like Badia region of Syria carries the risk of running across land mines left by the former Syrian regime and its allies.
Ali al-Aloush, recently appointed as Deir ez-Zor’s agriculture director, confirms this year’s drought has taken a heavy toll on both crops and animals of this long-neglected region. Even June’s Eid al-Adha – the festival of sacrifice in which Muslims traditionally slaughter sheep – failed to provide a boost. “Shepherds are selling their sheep for unmentionable prices,” he says.
Wheat in Syria, Dr. Aloush says, is typically planted in December and harvested in June and July. But this past planting season was a period of uncertainty due to the ouster of the Assad regime. The months that followed required five to six rounds of irrigation, which farmers were largely unable to manage. Electricity shortages and soaring fuel costs made it nearly impossible to power the water pumps that were available, and many farmers were already in debt.
Compounding the situation is the exceptionally low rainfall this year. Syria got just 95 millimeters (3.7 inches) of rain in the first quarter of 2025 – the lowest total since 1997 and far below the 1989–2015 average of 165 mm, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It warned this unprecedented drought could impact the livelihood of up to 16 million Syrians.
“Agricultural production in 2022 decreased by 82% compared to the 2020 growing season,” noted a recent report by humanitarian nonprofit Mercy Corps.
A barren breadbasket
The agricultural shortage is part of a longer decline that has been long in the making, says Dr. Aloush. “Since the start of the revolution in 2011, wheat production has steadily fallen,” he says. “The government stopped caring about agriculture as it was primarily focused on military matters. … We have many villages that have been emptied due to regime or ISIS [activity]. Almost all of Deir ez-Zor city and its countryside were displaced.”
“2010 was the last good year,” says Ahmed al-Suleimain, who grows wheat. “We would get water without cuts – water was never a concern. It’s been many years now that I have lost money; plant again and lose more money. I’ve had to sell land to pay my debts and eat.”
Two-thirds of Syria’s grain-producing regions are in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, one third in Damascus-controlled Deir ez-Zor, one of the most war-damaged and remote regions. Deir ez-Zor region “used to be known as the breadbasket,” says his brother Mahmoud, a barley grower who sums up the season as “bad, completely bad – from the perspective of water, fertilizers, and seeds.” Water presents the gravest problem – its absence has reduced the output of his barley fields to a sixth.
Mahmoud, a father of five, intends to keep going because there are no other job opportunities. “If you calculate the inputs, you come out negative,” he says. “This is the fourth year that we are laughing at ourselves [for] thinking things will be finally better.”
The people who are currently farming are typically landowners who never left, or returnees who have leased the land. Navigating the market is a challenge in itself, as selling grain technically requires an official 2024 certificate.
Rebuilding the agriculture
Syria was once self-sufficient in wheat. New local authorities now say they want to regain that status. Their plans include promoting drought-resistant wheat seeds for the coming planting season and modernizing irrigation systems. They have their heart set on acquiring laser land-leveling tools, which help determine the optimal gradient for efficient water use.
Regional priorities include rehabilitating salinized soils and expanding the acreage planted with wheat, says Dr. Aloush. He hopes farmers will come to embrace techniques like drip irrigation – using pipes that release water in precise amounts – and abandon the still-dominant flood irrigation method, where open channels waste much of the available water.
“People are slowly coming back to their lands and their fields,” says Dr. Aloush. “Things will move forward.”
