In a move that’s likely to be a major problem for government-controlled
parts of Syria, the Syrian Kurdish regional authorities have announced
that they will ban all wheat exports into government territory, with an eye toward growing their own stockpile of food.
That’s going to be a lot of wheat. Syrian Kurdish territory includes a
lot of the fertile territory in Syria’s north and east. After 350,000
tonnes harvested last year, the expectation is that they’ll be getting
900,000 tonnes of wheat.
It’s a big problem for Syria. Last year, they bought 100,000 tonnes of
wheat. This year they probably were going to want even more, as fighting
in the northwest, another fertile area, has left a lot of fields burned
and destroyed on both sides.
This could easily evolve into another of those wars where food is a
weapon, as with the Saudi war in Yemen. Syrian government territory
isn’t going to produce enough food to feed everyone there, and US and
Western sanctions are going to make it extremely difficult for Syria to
import food from anywhere else.
