FAO/Mazen Haffar

An innovative, integrated resilience-building approach forms the core of FAO’s collaboration with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO - the UK government aid provider) to implement a five-year project that will support an estimated 32 300 beneficiaries - with a special focus on women, persons with disabilities and young farmers - to sustain and boost their food production, adopt positive coping strategies, and become self-reliant. The programme seeks to impart good agricultural practices (GAP) and start to change farming mindsets, view farming as a business and encourage the creation of market-driven, viable food processing enterprises.

FAO Representative in the Syrian Arab Republic, Mike Robson, has welcomed the collaboration with UK AID: “The generous contribution of UK Aid of 11 million GBP holds the promise of medium to long-term food security for local communities who have suffered from the crisis in Syria. The project will also strengthen resilience to future economic and agro-climatic shocks by building and diversifying agriculture-based livelihoods.” he says.

The project will address gender explicitly, and hopes to achieve transformative change - in terms of positive social outcomes for women – both directly, and also indirectly by reducing the family stresses caused by food insecurity. “Women will take part in designing, planning and implementing the activities under BLRS, in a way that suits their needs,” stated the FAOR.  As part of the preparation for the project, FAO has conducted a set of vital initial assessments and community consultations, to deepen the understanding of natural resource availability at target locations, the market conditions and potential, as well as local ideas for enhancing food production and agriculture value chain activities.  

The project has four main elements – firstly, improving the provision of quality agricultural inputs, services and information to crisis-affected farmers, and supporting them to produce their own inputs.

A second component involves empowering farmers to take up adapted climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approaches and farming practices, through a practical learning environment in the field. The FAO Farmer Field Schools (FFS) approach will be used as a dynamic learning environment for farmers/livestock keepers to learn and experiment with modern techniques, and develop practical solutions to the problems faced. Moreover; in collaboration with UNFPA, FFS facilitators will be coached to recognize and address gender-related issues, including the economic exclusion of women. Furthermore, FAO with UNFPA, will implement a gender-responsive and gender-transformative pilot project in Homs, which will seek to promote gender equality and minimize violence against women and girls (VAWGs) in the context of a large agriculture-based livelihoods programme.

A third element of the project will involve the light rehabilitation of irrigation systems to enhance access to irrigation for food production and sustainable water usage.  Systems have been damaged in many of the targeted sub-districts - FAO will pay close attention to providing efficient and sustainable irrigation solutions.  It will also build the capacity of water users associations (WUAs) to manage the equitable distribution of water for irrigation. This is core to strengthening local ownership of assets and improving social cohesion among farmers. Efforts will be made to ensure that women are fully involved in the decision-making processes of these associations.

Finally, the programme will support beneficiaries - and particularly women, youth and persons with disabilities - to establish small agriculture-based micro-enterprises.  Through a series of previous resilience programmes in Syria, FAO has developed approaches to support beneficiaries in rural areas to learn about business management, processing techniques, food safety standards, post-harvest handling, storage and other topics to develop and sustain food-related value chains. FAO will incorporate the Farmer Business Schools (FBS) concept into its planned Farmers Field Schools FFS to introduce a better understanding of pricing, packaging and marketing.   FAO will also target youth to become entrepreneurs through ‘Nabta’ – a programme to provide grants to start-ups,  with a focus on business idea development and business planning.  Through a competitive process, the most viable and feasible business proposals will receive start-up grants and close supervision from FAO experts during the start-up phase.  Small-scale food producers and processors will also be supported financially through a voucher scheme, which will enhance access to the equipment and tools required to develop their household-scale microbusinesses successfully.

Climate continues to pose a threat to Syria’s crop, livestock and irrigation systems. Through its local partners, FAO will conduct regular data collection and dissemination of agro-climatic indicators and market information on agriculture-related risks (i.e. rainfall, temperature, crop pests, livestock diseases etc) and market trends. This will target at least 40 000 smallholder farmers and other peer farmers residing in targeted locations. FAO will also monitor agriculture seasonal performance and produce regular agriculture seasonal updates, which will highlight rain amounts and distribution, temperature, crop and livestock disease outbreaks, agricultural and food security trends, crop stage and condition, livestock situation, pasture availability and condition, water supply from various water sources and food security from BLRS targeted governorates and others.