AL DANA, NORTHERN SYRIA -- For the past six months, farmer Hisham al-Zeir’s wife and daughters have been up before sunrise each day when it’s still cool, baking traditional tanoor bread in a century-old clay oven in their home in Syria’s rich agricultural province of Idlib.
Rather than selling all his wheat to the state as he usually does, Zeir decided this year to keep almost a third of it to ensure his wife and six children have enough food to survive on as the conflict in the country spreads.
"I am putting it aside to eat from until Allah eases on his people and things become clearer," Zeir said in the courtyard of his modest farm on the outskirts of the town of Al Dana in Idlib, a region of gently rolling hills and olive groves that supplies a large proportion of Syria’s fruit.
Zeir is one of many Syrian farmers who have adjusted production during the crisis in order to grow enough produce for their own consumption and for use in exchange for other goods.
Eighty percent of people in Idlib live in the countryside, compared to only 40% of Syria’s total population of 20 million, making it the most rural province in the country.
The rural poor have been big supporters of the 17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule and their towns and villages have borne the brunt of the army’s campaign to crush the rebellion, in which at least 18,000 people have been killed.
Although the Syrian economy has been hammered by the conflict -- economists say it could contract by a fifth or more this year, but have no way of knowing for sure -- and much of the country’s industrial production has been hit, the rural economy has been less affected by the turmoil.
"A subsistence economy in these rural areas has in many cases allowed people to produce their own food needs. People’s ability to live off their land has helped in this crisis unlike urban dwellers," Samir Seifan, a prominent Syrian economist.
Enterprising rural communities have during times of conflict taken advantage of an abundance of land to grow cereals, olives and cotton.
The current crisis is reversing a decade-long exodus of rural residents to cities like Damascus and Aleppo, which exacerbated a wealth gap, as many are now fleeing violence in the cities and returning to villages. The conflict is never far away, however.
"A mortar has hit and killed two of my sheep and destroyed our yard," said Omar al-Natour, a day after army shelling at his house in the town of Al-Sahara in Idlib.
Natour, 45, a father of six, is no longer able to go to his job at a state-owned factory producing cement for construction in Aleppo because it lies in an area where army snipers fire at rebel hideouts. Instead, he supplements his meagre income by rearing cattle and other livestock.
Food production has been rising in Syria in recent years despite sharp fluctuations in harvests and bouts of drought. That has helped diversify the economy, and in the present conflict, staved off significant food shortages in the countryside so far, residents and Damascus-based economists said.
They contradict the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme (WFP) who estimated this month that about 1.5 million people in Syria need immediate food aid and one in three rural residents would need help.
Across the country, agricultural production, which officially accounts for 20% of Syria’s gross domestic product, continues, despite a shortage of seasonal laborers who once flocked to work in the fields during the harvest period.
This has secured adequate supply of vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers, staples of the Syrian diet, as well as grains, even though the high cost of tractor fuel and a lack of fertilizer has reduced the amount of cultivable land.
As the fighting in Syria shows no sign of abating, the populations of some rural towns in Idlib have surged, including Darat Azah and Al Dana, as they have been spared the wider destruction of towns such as Taftanaz and Atareb, where many houses have been pounded to rubble by tank fire.
To some extent, Syria’s highly regulated economy -- with its costly government subsidies, which keep electricity prices artificially low, and restrictions on imports -- have helped control inflation and stem a further decline in living standards for poor farming communities. Independent economists say inflation has not exceeded 30% despite the crisis.
"There are lower quantities of food but no food shortages in Syria ... there are people who are supplying food. As you know, in every crisis, there are those who profit," said a senior Syrian official who works at the state wheat procurement agency. -- Reuters
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