They survive on bread and sweet tea and live in dilapidated tents. Having fled from drought in north-eastern Syria, around 60,000 displaced families roam across the country in search of work. A humanitarian disaster, but with no aid in sight.

By Remco Andersen

“My land is completely parched,” says Abu Abdallah downheartedly, while half of his 15 children look on in the tent, which serves as a living room. He and his huge family come from northeast Syria, where up until recently they eked out a modest existence from a small piece of fertile land, on which they farmed grain.

Now they spend their days in a dusty field next to the motorway that leads to Damascus. If they can they pick tomatoes for a nearby farmer. That earns them a hundred liras a day per person – one and a half euros. Hardly enough to live on, but at home they have nothing anymore.

Huge disaster
A huge humanitarian disaster is threatening to unfold in Syria. Hardly any rain has fallen in the country’s northeastern granary, for the third year in a row. According to United Nations figures, 150,000 farmers saw their harvests fail this year. Small and medium-sized cattle farmers in the area have lost 80 percent of their stock due to a lack of feed and grassland. More than 800,000 people have lost just about everything. That is one in every 25 Syrians.

“We are talking about people who have been living on bread and sweet tea for a year,” says Silvana Giuffrida, deputy head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Syria. According to a recent UN report, one in four children under the age of five in the northern province of Ragga is malnourished – compared to one in ten in the rest of the country. “The situation is extremely acute.”

Tomato picking
The persistent drought, combined with the rising fuel and food prices, is forcing people to sell their belongings and put their children to work. In the past six months the number of displaced people has doubled and 60,000 families are roaming the country, in search of a way to survive, picking tomatoes or weeding. A popular spot to find work is in the fertile region at the foot of the Golan Heights in southern Syria.

Just off the motorway, dozens of tent communities are spread across an area measuring five by ten kilometres, occupied by thousands of destitute people from the northeast. A scene that makes you realise that the south has probably taken in tens of thousands of displaced people.

Vermin
The men have often already been on the move as seasonal workers for a couple of years, but the prolonged drought causes them to spend their winters in the south as well. Then their families join them.

“My whole village is here,” says Mohammed, a grain farmer, who has been living in a dilapidated tent on the edge of a tomato field for three years. “There were 20 families in the first year, then 50, and now there are 500.” Barefooted children play in the sand crawling with vermin. There is no water, no electricity, no sanitation and no aid.

There is no aid because the phenomenon is relatively new here, and the Syrian government is not keen to see tens of thousands of casual workers who could seriously disrupt the situation in the south. A chronic lack of money also plays an important role: last year UN organisations in Syria asked for 14 million euros to help drought victims – they got 2.8 million.

The few aid activities that happen are concentrated in the northeast, where at the end of last year the Syrian authorities, supported by the World Food Programme and a number of NGOs, started providing food aid to the most vulnerable families who stayed behind. The UN says it needs 37.6 million euros in the coming year for food and medical aid. They also want to give farmers new livestock and seeds in the hope that there will be more rain next season.

Outcasts
Improvement in the northeast is supposed to persuade the families who have left to return. The problem is that most of them do not see the point, explains Abu Abdallah, “The land is barren.”

Nevertheless he is curious for news about the situation in the north. “Before the rains stopped the grass grew this high,” he says, while he jumps up putting his hand to his waist. “Things were good, I looked after my family. Now I am an outcast, people look down on me. This life has cost me my dignity.”