FSL

In Syria, which has been suffering from a continuous war for more than seven years in which the number of victims exceeded 500 thousand Syrians, caused the displacement of half the population, and damaged the economic and agricultural pillar in one of the oldest countries in the world that knew and flourished agriculture. Not long ago, before the outbreak of recent events, farming provided a quarter of Syria’s economic output and employed a quarter of its workforce.
However, the systematic war and bombing in areas that have been out of control of the Syrian regime since 2011 have destroyed infrastructures, such as irrigation canals and grain silos, and crippled a state system that once provided farmers with seeds and purchased their crops. A sustained drought has only exacerbated the humanitarian crisis.
IhsanRD has intervened to assist farmers and vulnerable families in IDP’s host communities in order to enhance their ability to produce the various crops and food needed to feed their families and children.
Dr. Munther, Coordinator of Food Security and Livelihoods Program at IhsanRD, expressed the organization’s strategy and vision for its projects: “Relief baskets and emergency response cannot last forever, so projects need to be launched in order to help communities in starting their own businesses, to meet their food needs. We are trying to help people stand up and rely on themselves to start generating their own income.”
IhsanRD in collaboration with ACTED International has launched a new agriculture support project that includes two main activities:
The first activity is supporting for 3600 households to plant their houses’ gardens by supplying them with seeds, drip irrigation systems, tanks and agricultural tools.
This part of the project will extend over a period of 3 years so that each year will have new beneficiaries. Each family will receive two sets of gardening inputs per year for the winter and summer seasons. It will suffice for a garden area of about 1 dunum and provide an additional supplement to the food needs of each household.
The provision of inputs to the beneficiaries in the form of vouchers distributed in summer and winter can be replaced by a set of garden tools and inputs that were designed and studied in advance in the local stores. These kits will increase the accessibility of families to low-cost food and improve their food diversity.
Umm Rami was displaced along with her four children from the southern countryside of Aleppo towards Idlib governorate. She has no income source after her husband’s absence two years ago, forcing her to work in the farms adjacent to the town where she lives now. This prompted her to cultivate the small plot of land attached to her temporary home with her children after her application for the IhsanRD home garden support project was accepted.
“I’m very excited to start planting the garden behind my house, so my family will get the vegetables they need in their food instead of getting them at a high market price,” says Umm Rami.
This part of the project also includes 6 practical training during the duration of the project. Focusing on improved agricultural practices, best practices, and climate-smart agricultural techniques. Training will be complemented to include a section on sharing experiences from the past year to support a review and improvements in agricultural support programming among humanitarian and development actors. The training includes topics on plant care, harvesting techniques, and seed collection and production techniques so that farmers can sustain themselves after the end of the project.
The second part of the project is aimed at supporting farmers in agriculture and training in the area of Bensh, where the plowing service is provided to olive farmers. 500 farmers will benefit from this activity, equivalent to 1250 acres of plowed lands. In addition to providing support in the cultivation of wheat to farmers by providing them with agricultural inputs and the practical training of about 140 farmers.

Saleh, a breadwinner for his family of a wife and four children recalls his family suffering in securing food after having been displaced from their town in Hama countryside to the countryside of Idlib: “my youngest daughter wasn’t eating enough food, she did not want to eat the same meal every day of canned food which we got from the relief basket.” Saleh’s family like many displaced families who have no choice but the canned food from humanitarian organizations that respond to ongoing displacement waves in Syria.

In fact, Syria is one of the most food-insecure places. According to the United Nations, there are still more than 13 million people in need and more than 6 million displaced in Syria. But the situation was not always like this. Seven years ago, Syria was one of the most stable countries in the region, where agricultural products – the pride of a Syrian farmer – were highly demanded in terms of exporting, and Syrians were accustomed to the diversity of their meals due to the famous Syrian cuisine.

The situation now is different after years of war, bombing and targeting infrastructure in the areas that are not under the Syrian government’s control, where irrigation systems damaged and farmers displaced from their lands, and prices have jumped dramatically with rising of unemployment rate, citizens of Syria today do not have enough to buy the various needs that were considered as living basics in the past, and millions of Syrian families suffer from severe food shortages.

At the end of 2017, IhsanRD, in cooperation with WHH and funded by the German Foreign Office, has launched a project to support food security in the north of Syria. IhsanRD’s team who works in Idlib governorate, where a large number of displaced people is hosted, distributes food vouchers monthly to 3,700 families in the hosting communities. The food voucher allows the eligible families to exchange the voucher of $50 for the food they need in the stores that IhsanRD has contracted with.

Saleh and his family were very happy to receive food vouchers and his younger daughter, Samira, had improved and now she eats better.

The project of Food Vouchers was designed to do more than feeding the hungry. This project also aims to support the local economy by building partnerships with local suppliers.

One of the local stores’ owners, Mr. Abdulhai says: “Now I can pay off my debts and get the treatment for my wife who lost her leg. Sales movement and purchase has increased impressively in both the store and local market. Maybe I will soon diversify the goods in the store to meet the customers’ needs who received food vouchers from IhsanRD.”

By the end of food vouchers distribution next month, which has contributed to alleviate the suffering of displaced families who sought to secure food, in addition, to assist in supporting the local economy. Syria is still under war and far from stability, and most of the population suffers from poverty and unemployment, whereas displacement waves are still ongoing.

Syria has serious needs to establish sustainable programs to confront poverty and food insecurity that mix the short and long terms, combining emergency response with building resilience and helping families lift themselves out of poverty. This is what IhsanRD is doing through its projects that have been carried out in order to strengthen the communities’ capacities and enable them to possess the production tools in their hands.

In Syria, every season the farmer relies on his land for living. However, harsh conditions of war have led him to seek new ways to invest the land in an optimal manner, which recover the lack of food and the difficulty of living and in order to achieve the greatest yield for the crop. One of the scientific methods on which the farmer depends on to increase production is the method of inter-crops.

“Inter-crops” is a well-known agricultural practice in sustainable agriculture. The main advantage of this agriculture is the increased efficiency of the use of available natural resources and an overall increase in crop productivity, compared with the cultivation of one crop. For example, the cultivation of leguminous crops in the areas between fruit trees which are beneficial to the soil in terms of fertility replenishment. The inclusion of pulses in multiple crop systems, such as inter-crops or simple crop rotation, is important for the sustainable management of soil nutrients, and towards more sustainable agricultural practices. It is of paramount importance given the need to intensify food production while at the same time using best-used natural resources and building capacity to adapt to climate change.

In the northern countryside of Homs, which suffered from the harsh effects of war, and continues to suffer from the conditions of the siege and the difficulty of introducing raw materials for agriculture, IhsanRD has launched “inter-crops” project to support food security and livelihoods by providing support to 400 families within inter-crops project between trees for more than 1100 dunums by providing farmers with agricultural inputs (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides), as well as partial irrigation support. The project also aims to support the most vulnerable and reach the besieged areas of Syria to enhance the resilience of the population and improve safe access to food.

IhsanRD has organized field training seminars for farmers within the framework of the Inter-crops Project, with the aim of increasing practical experience in applying the best agricultural practices in the service of legumes and olive trees. The training covers practically all topics related to modern methods of agriculture, the use of machinery, planting dates, fertilization, disease control and modern irrigation techniques. Haj Abu Saleh, who was present at the symposium, spoke of the motivation for his presence: ” We may wait for the food basket aid, or we may plant what we really need by our hands. For me, I prefer eating from what I plant myself. When farmer the gives the best effort to his land and by the right agricultural practices, it will give him in return a better crop.”

This training seminars come after the project team successfully completed the previous stages, which included the first phase of registration of farmers in the project lists, and then conducting field inspection and standard testing of the quality of seeds and fertilizers before distributing them to farmers. Then spraying of fertilizers and sowing seeds that were previously distributed to farmers under the supervision of technical engineers and taking standard measurements according to modern methods of tillage and sowing.

As the number of displaced people in rural Idlib reaches to about 400 thousand displaced according to the “Response Coordinators of northern Syria” on Monday, 05-02-2018, many humanitarian organizations are still working to provide the necessary needs of displaced families who are living in tragic conditions which is getting worse in the cold winter, However, there remains the need for more relief efforts and for the cooperation of all parties to stop this humanitarian tragedy.

Abu Hasan, one of the displaced people from the southern Aleppo countryside, struggles with his age to look after his grandchildren who lost their father seven months ago. “I have fled from my town in the southern countryside of Aleppo to the town of Atarb. I want to protect my grandchildren … I want to take them to a safe place”. But Abu Hassan could not take anything out of his house except what he could carry with his hands, he has the only clothes which he wears. Now, he lives in a camp with his family and three grandchildren. “We have fled the bombardment, but we are still under the threat of hunger and cold,” he said.

As part of its Emergency Response Plan (ERC), Ihsan for Relief and Development works to help the newly displaced families by providing food baskets, blankets, clothing and dignity kits, where IhsanRD in cooperation with the World Food Program (WFP) has distributed 2300 food basket in the area of ​​Aazaz and 3552 food baskets in the area of Atareb and Daret Azza, the basket contains Ready-to-eat food items sufficient a family for a week.

Mr. Wael, the project’s officer within the department of Emergency Response for IDPs at IhsanRD, said: “Humanitarian organizations have been very active in the north of Syria and Idlib in particular, supporting all sectors, including health, education and relief, but the longtime of this crisis and the recent massive wave of displacement calls for more efforts to provide the displaced with life-basic food, shelter and heating materials”.

After registering the farmers in the intercropping” project,  field verification visits have been conducted and standards tests were applied on seeds and fertilizers before being distributed to the farmers.

Last week, the tillage stage has been ended, followed by seeding the fields after the fertilizing process. Sowing seeds process was under the supervision of technical engineers and standard measurements according to the modern methods of tillage and sowing. Thus, plowing and sowing of one thousand one hundred twenty-five acres for about four hundred farmers have been completed within “Intercropping” project in the villages of Rastan and Talbisa in the northern Homs countryside.

Ahmed, the Project Officer of Intercropping project in the Food Security Program at IhsanRD said: “The importance of the project is to provide benefit to farmers in two ways:

As legume crops are an important source to feed farmers’ families, local people and as a source of income as well.

It also will contribute to benefit the olive trees and the renewal of soil fertility through planting legume crops.”

This project aims to support the food security and livelihoods of people in the northern Homs countryside through the provision of leguminous seeds for planting among fruit trees, as well as, providing fertilizers and tillage of land and partial support for irrigation.

The displacement movement continues from both eastern countryside of Idlib and Hama to inside Idlib province and border camps to escape armed clashes and heavy shelling which have started one month ago. Where some reports mentioned that more than 130 thousand displaced people in the recent days quoting the Response Room for the Displaced in the north of Syria. Mohammed Jafa, Coordinator of the Response said in a statement to Orient news: “The organizations were surprised by this enormous amount of displacement, the fact that they were not able to collect accurate statistics displaced people because of the complex displacement situation and ongoing battles, where response programs cannot be developed in the context of continuous displacement from place to place due to intensive shelling in the countryside of Idlib and Hama.

He added that all organizations need to develop programs to cope with the displacement, but the number of displaced people is getting crazy in a short time, with 150 thousand displaced so far and 200 families displaced on daily biases from the eastern regions. Some humanitarian organizations have provided some support, but it didn’t cope with the displacement volume.

He pointed out that this humanitarian situation requires direct international intervention to help this huge amount, because the displaced need tens of thousands of rations, in addition to thousands of tents, as the organizations are powerless in the disastrous situation of this wave of displacement.”

Ihsan for Relief and Development has launched an urgent distribution campaign of 230 food baskets within an Emergency Response Plan in Al-atarab area for newly displaced families from Sinjar and Eastern countryside of Hama. The food basket contains ready-to-eat items sufficient a family for a week.

A large number of the displaced people who arrived in nearby villages or who are sitting outdoors are still suffering from extreme cold, as an urgent intervention by humanitarian organizations is needed to provide shelter and heating at least to face the cold in winter.