Agricultural experts, traders and Syrian farmers who talked to local press have now given crop estimates ranging from 1 million metric tons to 1.7million at best, this is a significant lower sum given by the United Nations earlier this month.
Before the war, Syria used to produce around 3.5 million metric tons of wheat on average, this was enough to satisfy local demand and usually able substantial exports, and this was thanks in parts to the irrigation from Euphrates River that waters its vast eastern desert.
The last time Syria’s wheat harvest failed to exceed 1 million metric tons was back in 1973, although catastrophic droughts have pushed the crop close to that level in 1989 and 2008.
The U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) had cited an estimate of 1.7 million to 2 million metric tons for this year and said that rainfall relied on for crops in Syria's north western region was less than half of the average since September.
There are a lot of factors which play part in the reduced production of wheat, these mainly being the soil ploughing and fertilization, transport and marketing all of which is severely disrupted and reduced to a minimum level. Before the war, the Syrian government would typically buy 2.5 million tons of wheat each year to distribute around for bakeries that support and feed the public. Government purchases of domestic wheat have declined and are expected to fall further as chaos caused by civil war and drought Hurth the state's ability to secure supplies.
Around a third of Syrians have either fled the country or are displaced within it, this has caused the country's food distribution network to crumble.
The agriculture ministry have told the state media that wheat was only being grown on 1.2 million hectares of land but did not give an estimate of how much would be produced or bought by the government. According to the U.S Department of Agriculture Syria would typically plant 1.7 million hectares before war.