Syria: 'You can't have an entire population dependent on aid'

Given the brutality that has come to characterise Syria’s four-year war, it is understandable that discussion of the conflict has focused on violent deaths. But there is another scourge destroying lives in the country: economic ruin and crippling poverty – what a UN-backed report (pdf) called “an equally horrendous but silent disaster”.

Some aid organisations and policy experts are finding that, with more than four out of five Syrians in poverty, traditional humanitarian aid, while necessary, just isn’t enough. So they’re advocating for, and implementing, livelihood projects – intervention to assist people’s abilities to support themselves.

One of these is the Danish Refugee Council (DRC). As Peter Klanso, DRC’s Middle East and north Africa director, told Irin: “You cannot have an entire population that is dependent on humanitarian aid. That doesn’t make any sense.”In the country’s north-east, once known as Syria’s breadbasket, agricultural production has dropped sharply, and farmers have been battered from all sides.

Displacement caused by shifting frontlines has resulted in missed harvest and planting seasons – 6.6 million Syrians have been internally displaced by the violence inside their country. People who returned to areas vacated by the so-called Islamic State (Isis), for example, have come home to neglected soil and can’t afford seeds.

Government agricultural subsidies have reduced or, in some areas, disappeared. Before the conflict, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was the primary purchaser of wheat and maize; it still buys these products in some places, but on a far smaller scale. Research by a major NGO working in north-east Syria – shared with Irin on the condition the charity not be named for the safety of its staff – found that a flood of in-kind aid has resulted in a fall in demand for agricultural products.

This is not a region always hardest hit by violence, but many are heavily in debt and selling all they have to feed their children. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) told Irin that 70%-90% of those it polled in northern Syria in July admitted to spending more than they earn each week.