A Damascus farmer who once hired 15 hands now takes on 6-7. His fields give a quarter of the usual harvest. “The land is missing the water,” he told Arab News in September 2025. “This season is weak, you could call it half a season.”
His plot is a small piece of a much larger failure. Before the 2011 uprising, Syrian growers produced 3.5-4.5 million tons of wheat a year, enough to feed the country. Fighting cut that to 2.2-2.6 million tons. The 2025 crop, hit by the worst drought in decades, was projected at 1 million tons. Syria’s Ministry of Internal Trade said that would last two to three months, and the government has to import 60-70 percent of the wheat that roughly 23 million people need.
A war fought through hunger
Food was never just a casualty of Syria’s war. Armed forces used it. The Council on Foreign Relations records that sieges, run by the regime and by other armed groups, were turned on civilian populations as a tool of pressure. By 2018 the UN humanitarian agency counted more than one million people in areas that were “besieged or otherwise beyond the reach of aid.”
Aid itself was rationed by politics. A 2014 Security Council resolution was meant to open routes, yet Assad allowed UN convoys only into government-held areas. Rights advocates documented attacks on medical facilities and staff. In 2020 Russia used its veto to cut UN deliveries to the rebel-held north from four border crossings to one.
Eastern Aleppo fell in December 2016, and a UN spokesperson called the last days “a complete meltdown of humanity.” The Idlib offensive of late 2019 and early 2020 drove about nine hundred thousand people from their homes, the largest single displacement of the war.
Fourteen million uprooted
The CFR puts the total at roughly fourteen million of Syria’s twenty-two million prewar residents, nearly seven million of them displaced inside the country and almost as many abroad. Turkey took in over three million. Lebanon, with a population just over five million, hosted approximately 1.5 million. Jordan took more than half a million, and over a million asylum seekers reached Europe.
Sanctions complicated recovery. The CFR describes the U.S. Caesar Act, written to pressure the regime, as ineffective at that aim and costly mainly for ordinary Syrians. More than 90 percent of the population lived in poverty even after the fighting eased. Then came the 7.8-magnitude earthquake of February 2023, which killed between six and eight thousand people and left at least eleven thousand homeless. In the opposition-held northwest, fewer than half of the prewar health facilities were still working.
After Assad, the pressure remains
The fall of the Assad government in December 2024 has not ended the squeeze. The World Food Programme says 13.3 million of Syria’s 24.4 million people are food insecure, and 7.1 million face acute food insecurity. Funding shortfalls forced the agency to halve its emergency coverage, from 14 governorates to 7. It now reaches 650,000 people, down from 1.3 million.
Prices keep climbing. Bread rose over 18% after subsidies were withdrawn, with cuts in February 2025, May 2026 and June 2026. In June 2026 the government trimmed subsidized bread bundles from 10 loaves to 8 and held the price. Wages run 300-500 USD a month, while bulgur sells at 130 new Syrian pounds per kilogram.
The WFP warned that Syria is at a “critical turning point” and that falling aid could “deepen hardship during its fragile transition.” The United States, its largest donor, has sharply reduced foreign aid under the Trump administration.
Sources
- Syria's Civil War: The Descent Into Horror (Council on Foreign Relations)
- The worst drought in decades is threatening Syria's fragile recovery from years of civil war (Arab News)
- WFP says hunger worsening in Syria as aid cuts deepen (Arab News)
