About
30 percent of Syria’s labor force works in agriculture. About one-third of its land
is cultivatable. Only one-quarter of that land is irrigated, with much of this
irrigation being of wasteful nature.
Agriculture
accounts for close to 85% of Syria’s water consumption. A combination of increased water-intensive
wheat and cotton cultivation, inefficient irrigation techniques like flooding,
which uses 30-40 percent more water than modern drip irrigation, and leaky water distribution networks, has
seen colossal quantities of water wasted.
Furthermore,
despite the 2005
law against drilling wells, desperate, farmers have continued to create illegal wells, which are drilled ever
deeper to reach an
already-low water table,
and causing an
increase in the salinity of the water. Within eight years, the number of wells
drilled almost doubled to 213, 000.
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