When the drought in Syria started in 2008, the United Nations issued an appeal for funding for food aid for the many farmers whose crops had failed and animals had either been sold or died. In August the next year, with the drought getting worse and lasting longer than any other on record, another international appeal for help was announced. By the end of 2009, it had raised just 14 percent of what was needed.

Few western governments had good relations with Syria and it was seen as a low priority in humanitarian terms. The drought received little attention. The New York Times ran a single paragraph on it in 2008 and not another word for two years. Food aid is still driven by donor concerns and media attention, not by the needs of people going hungry.

By 2010 the drought was having a massive impact on Syrian society. Migration to cities accelerated, raising tensions across the country but particularly in Daraa, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. The government did little to help. In part the dead hand of the moribund Syrian government was unable to move fast enough but also its economic reforms focused not on the rural poor but on the emerging crony capitalism that had taken off in the early part of the decade. Decades of political tensions, economic inequality and state brutality on a massive scale would prompt protests and then civil war.

Syria’s economy has been ruined by the war with some estimates suggesting it is half the size it was before the conflict. Looking forward, any reconstruction is going to have to deal with the issue of drought and the permanent water shortages that the country will face, in part because of the policies of the past six decades and in part because of climate change. The farmer sector will likely shrink and the country will no longer be self-sufficient in many of its foods. Rural populations will decline and when refugees and IDPs do go home, they will likely head to cities rather than villages. Water and climate change were factors in the start of the civil war. Addressing them will have to be part of an eventual solution.

See our briefing “Drought in Syria” here.

The post Drought in Syria appeared first on The Aleppo Project.

“We liberated the rural parts of Aleppo province. We waited and waited for Aleppo City to rise, and it didn’t. We couldn’t rely on them to do it for themselves so we had to bring the revolution to them.” Those were the words in July 2012 of Abu Hashish, a commander from a village in the country near Aleppo. The conflict had indeed spread from the Idleb countryside to northern Aleppo in the early part of the year but only reached the city in July.

Aleppo had been relatively calm before then but it had not been at peace before the conflict, as many think. Small demonstrations took place in marginalized neighborhoods and the University of Aleppo; tensions were rising and had been for some time. The appearance of calm before the armed conflict was due to the regime’s decades-old alliance with the cities’ tribal and business elite. It may have kept the city from rising up but it was also why rural rebels eventually brought the conflict to the city.

Ibn Khaldun, the 14^th century philosopher and historian, described a circulation of hardened rural warriors who swept into cities to remove the soft, corrupt elites there. In turn the warriors softened like those they removed from power and in turn were removed. Aleppo’s conflict came about in part because of a massive decline in living standards in the countryside, due to drought (see The Aleppo Project paper Drought in Syria), the failure of the government to respond to water shortages and because of policies since 2000 that created an economy of urban cronies while ignoring the countryside. That drove migration to cities – Syrian cities grew by 50 percent from 2000-2010 – and the new arrivals started to see the inequalities of the system.

While the vocabulary of the Syrian war consists of sectarian conflict, ethnic division, religious hostilities, conspiracy theories and extremism, some of the underlying drivers of the conflict, including class divisions and the rural-urban divide don’t often appear in the analysis. And yet going back to the 1960s and 1970s, almost every conflict or uprising across the Middle East was preceded by a massive movement of people to cities.

The post Aleppo: Rural-Urban Grievance appeared first on The Aleppo Project.