The region is predominantly arid or semi-arid, and agriculture is primarily rainfed. Temperatures are often extreme and rainfall is both scarce and variable from one growing season to the next. As a result, agriculture is a risky enterprise, and farmers, especially those with small landholdings, often adopt production strategies, such as crop and livestock diversification, to minimize the risks associated with a variable and difficult climate. Population growth is very rapid, with countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Syria registering some of the highest growth rates in the world.
Most farmers are subsistence farmers.
The tendency for the majority of farms in the region to be small prevents them from absorbing the available labour in large families, let alone incurring the costs of hiring labour from outside the farm. A high dependency of the farm household on the labour market for outside additional income affects the composition of farm households, with women, children and older men left behind to carry out a large bulk of the agricultural work. Although the overwhelming majority of urban and rural households are headed by men in the Near East, women-headed households occupy a considerable percentage of total rural households and their number is increasing as a result of high migration. For example, almost a quarter of all rural households in Pakistan and the Sudan are currently headed by women. Consequently, women farmers have increasingly found themselves becoming major contributors to the agricultural labour force, the majority of whom work for very long hours all year long as unpaid family labour.