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Resilience Through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict Resilience Through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict

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Resilience Through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict Resilience Through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict Resilience through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict Resilience through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict Global Communities, May 2018 CONTRIBUTORS: Shane Middleton Linda Öhman Patricia Dorsher Anas Al Kaddour Anne Folan EDITOR: David Humphries 2 Global Communities Contents Executive Summary .............................................................................................................4 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................6 Agriculture in Syria ..............................................................................................................8 Agriculture in Syria – Background ......................................................................................9 The 2006-2010 Drought ....................................................................................................9 Impact of the Conflict .........................................................................................................10 The Outlook for Support to the Sector ................................................................................11 Agriculture in Syria Today ...................................................................................................11 Humanitarian Assistance and Agriculture .........................................................................14 Resilience in Humanitarian Assistance ..............................................................................15 Case Studies: Agriculture and Resilience in Syria .............................................................16 Small Farm Kits ..................................................................................................................17 Agriculture Extension Visits ...............................................................................................19 Irrigation Canal Rehabilitation ............................................................................................20 Disaster Risk Reduction: Crop Fire Response ....................................................................21 Agriculture in a Conflict Zone: Lessons Learned from Practical Implementation ............22 Participant Selection: Need, Vulnerability, Technical Capacity ............................................22 Working with Local Communities to Secure Access ............................................................25 Partnerships with Other NGOs and INGOs .........................................................................26 Partnering with Local NGOs – Global Communities’ Approach ...........................................27 Maintaining Syrian Capacity ...............................................................................................29 Coordination .......................................................................................................................29 Procurement .......................................................................................................................30 Implementation: Choice of Modalities - Cash, Vouchers, in Kind ........................................31 Monitoring & Evaluation .....................................................................................................31 Exit Strategy and Sustainability Planning ...........................................................................32 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................33 Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................35 Resilience through Humanitarian Assistance: Agriculture in the Syria Conflict 3 for vegetables, as well as crops which can be grown Executive Summary inside tents and other shelters. This work has been Resilience through Humanitarian Assistance: primarily targeted at IDPs living in a displaced person Agriculture in the Syria Conflict seeks to address a camp, who either plant near their tents or rent or share complex question: how can humanitarian assistance land with landowners near the camps. more effectively help vulnerable communities in the long-term? In this case, we specifically focus on the • Small Farm Kits (pages 17-18): These kits, tailored challenge of providing humanitarian support to sustain for either the winter or spring/summer growing season, local agricultural capacities in conflict-affected north- contain a variety of seeds for staple crops and west Syria. vegetables. They also contain the tools and fertilizers necessary to cultivate crops and manage larger plots Agriculture in Syria (pages 8-13) of land. Syria’s history provides both benefits and barriers for an • Agriculture extension visits (page 19): This agricultural resilience approach. The benefits include the involves upgrading agricultural extension services, such size of Syria’s agriculture sector, which used to account as those by veterinarians and agronomists, equipping for 40 percent of employment and 27 percent of GDP. them with necessary tools for providing mobile services The barriers include the pre-conflict centralized control to farmers and animal breeders. by the government of every aspect of agriculture. With the drought of 2006-10 and the subsequent reduction • Irrigation canal rehabilitation (page 20): Irrigation of government subsidies, the agriculture industry was canals are one example of public infrastructure that has plunged into crisis, which was a precipitating stressor been rehabilitated to help farmers. for the conflict This, in turn, led to the breakdown of the • agricultural system in areas of Syria outside government Disaster risk reduction (DRR) – fire response Crop fires can be disastrous for farmers in control. The challenge from a capacity standpoint is that (page 21): Syria. DRR efforts emphasize rapid response capability centrally managed public facilities (such as irrigation through collaboration with local councils and farmers canals) have not been maintained and farmers are to identify those with tractors/disk plows in strategic historically unused to dealing with planning and market locations; provide a strategic reserve of fuel dedicated forces in crop sales, for example. The impact of the for use only in the event of a crop/orchard fire; and conflict on displacement, poverty and damage to the have response team members identified and trained to sector further challenges food security and production. ensure teams are prepared for deployment. Humanitarian Assistance and Agriculture in a Conflict Zone: Lessons Agriculture (pages 14-15) Learned from Practical Implementation Resilience programming in the context of Syria can (pages 22-32) bridge humanitarian and development interventions, by directing humanitarian assistance to strengthen the This section focuses on efforts to adapt elements of the Syrian agricultural sector at the individual, household and humanitarian system to implement successful resilience community levels. It can target stakeholders ranging from programming. professional agronomists and veterinarians to farming households and community-based organizations, such • Participant Selection: need, vulnerability, as farmers’ unions. A resilience-building intervention technical capacity (page 22-24) Resilience-oriented can strengthen the sector by improving infrastructure agricultural programs require nuanced beneficiary that serves agriculture, and it can increase communities’ selection criteria, essentially, two sets: the household or capacities to maintain them. individual’s need as well as the technical prerequisites for implementation (such as experience, assets and Case Studies: Agriculture and skills). The latter will differ depending on the type of assistance provided. This means that one cannot Resilience in Syria (pages 16-21) always select the most vulnerable as they would not have the resources to use the intervention effectively. This section provides examples of resilience-focused agricultural work in Syria. This includes: • Working with local communities to secure access (page 25-26): In order to implement programs, NGOs • Kitchen gardens (page 16): Designed to be grown must secure access to those communities. Working in on relatively small areas, kits contain a variety of seeds Syria requires close partnership with local stakeholders 4 Global Communities for this purpose. INGOs maintaining humanitarian Conclusion (page 33) principles should work with local councils only to get Despite an uncertain of the future and the risks to operational access to a community. investments, many in the farming community are keeping the Syrian agriculture sector alive, showing their • Partnering with local NGOs (page 27-31): resilience in the face of conflict. Partnering with local NGOs requires careful scrutiny of the organization, beginning with the basics of internal • Focusing entirely on pure humanitarian assistance that controls, reviewing organizational capacity and for looks for quick impact actually undermines the agriculture best practices such as an annual external audit. sector in the longer term by building dependency rather Global Communities checks all organizations through than building on people’s capacities. The type of support databases, such as the US Treasury Office of Foreign that the agriculture sector needs fundamentally does not Assets Control, to ensure that there is no risk of funds mesh with
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