DAMASCUS – The worst drought in decades is gripping much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, drying out rivers and lakes, shriveling crops and leading to dayslong tap water cutoffs in major cities.

The situation is particularly dire in Syria, where experts say rainfall has been declining for decades and where the fledgling government is trying to stitch the country back together following a 14-year civil war that left millions impoverished and reliant on foreign aid.

Small-farmer Mansour Mahmoud al-Khatib said that during the war, he couldn’t reach his fields in the Damascus suburb of Sayyida Zeinab some days because militants from the Lebanese Hezbollah militia allied with then-President Bashar Assad would block the roads. That problem vanished when Hezbollah withdrew after Assad fell in a December rebel offensive, but the drought has devastated his farm, drying up the wells that irrigate it.

“The land is missing the water,” al-Khatib told The Associated Press recently as he watched workers feed the wheat he did manage to harvest into a threshing machine. “This season is weak — you could call it half a season. Some years are better and some years are worse, but this year is harsh.”

In a good year, his land could produce as much as 800 to 900 kilograms (1,764 to 1,984 pounds) of wheat per dunam, an area equal to 0.1 hectares and 0.25 acres. This year, it yielded about a quarter that much, he said. He hired only six or seven workers this harvest season instead of last year’s 15.

Syria’s withering crops

Because the drought followed a prolonged war, farmers who were already financially stretched have had little ability to cope with its effects, said Jalal Al Hamoud, national food security officer for the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Syria.

Before the uprising-turned-civil war that began in 2011, Syrian farmers produced an average of 3.5 million to 4.5 million tons of wheat per year, which was enough to meet the country’s domestic needs, according to Saeed Ibrahim, director of agricultural planning and economics in Syria’s Agriculture Ministry.

That annual yield dropped to 2.2 million to 2.6 million tons during the war, and in recent years, the government has had to import 60% to 70% of its wheat to feed its roughly 23 million people. This year’s harvest is expected to yield only 1 million tons, forcing the country to spend even more of its strained resources on imports.

Mudar Dayoub, a spokesperson for Syria’s Ministry of Internal Trade and Consumer Protection, said this year’s wheat crop will only last for two or three months and that the government is “currently relying on signing contracts to import wheat from abroad” and on donations, including from neighboring Iraq.

But in a country where the World Food Program estimates that half the population is food-insecure, Ibrahim warned that “total reliance on imports and aid threatens food security” and is “unsustainable.”

The drought isn’t the only major issue facing Syria, where postwar reconstruction is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Since Assad fled, the country has been rattled by outbreaks of sectarian violence, and there’s growing doubt about whether the new authorities will be able to hold it together. Without jobs or stability, millions of refugees who fled during the war are unlikely to come home.

Interconnected crises

A dam on the Litani River in neighboring Lebanon’s fertile Bekaa Valley forms Lake Qaraoun, a reservoir that spans about 12 square kilometers (4.6 square miles).

Over the years, climate change has led to a gradual decline in the water flowing into the reservoir, said Sami Alawieh, head of the Litani River National Authority.

This summer, after an unusually dry winter left Lebanon without the water reserves its usually banks through snow and rainfall, it has shrunk to the size of a pond, surrounded by a vast expanse of parched land.

Although an average of 350 million cubic meters (12.4 billion cubic feet) of water flows into the lake during the rainy season each year, meeting about one-third of Lebanon’s annual demand, this year the incoming water didn’t exceed 45 million cubic meters (1.6 billion cubic feet), he said.

Lebanon’s water woes have further exacerbated the drought in Syria, which partially relies on rivers flowing in from its western neighbor.

The largest of those is the Orontes, also known as the Assi. In Syria’s Idlib province, the river is an important source of irrigation water, and fishermen make their living from its banks. This year, dead fish littered the dried-out river bed.

“This is the first time it’s happened that there was no water at all,” said Dureid Haj Salah, a farmer in Idlib’s Jisour al-Shugour. Many farmers can’t afford to dig wells for irrigation, and the drought destroyed not only summer vegetable crops but decades-old trees in orchards, he said.

“There is no compensation for the loss of crops,” Haj Salah said. “And you know the farmers make just enough to get by.”

Mostafa Summaq, director of water resources in Idlib province, said the groundwater dropped by more than 10 meters (33 feet) in three months in some monitoring wells, which he attributed to farmers overpumping due to a lack of rain. Local officials are considering installing metered irrigation systems, but it would be too expensive to do without assistance, he said.

A drier climate

Most experts agree that Syria and the broader region appear headed toward worse climate shocks, which they aren’t prepared to absorb.

Climate change makes some regions wetter and others drier, and the Middle East and Mediterranean are among those that are drying out, said Matti Kummu, a professor at Aalto University in Finland who specializes in global food and water issues. Syria, specifically, has shown a trend of reduced rainfall over the past 40 years, while it has been using water at an unsustainable rate.

“There’s not enough water from rainfall or from snowmelt in the mountains to recharge the groundwater,” Kummu said. Due to increasing irrigation needs, he said, “the groundwater table is going lower and lower, which means that it’s less accessible and requires more energy (to pump).” At some point, the groundwater might run out.

Even with limited means, the country could take measures to mitigate the impacts, such as increased rainwater harvesting, switching to more drought-tolerant crops and trying to put more effective irrigation systems in place, even simple ones.

But “in the long term, if the situation in terms of the climate change impacts continues” as currently projected, how much of the croplands will be arable in the coming decades is an open question, Kummu said.

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Associated Press reporters Omar Albam in Jisr al-Shugour, Syria, and Fadi Tawil in Qaraoun, Lebanon, contributed to this report.

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