Interesting subject. Food self-sufficiency is of a strategic importance, let alone its positive impact on keeping inflation at bay.
The culprit in Syria is not agricultural, rather its the mismanagement of agriculture. Go to Google Earth and check out Israel farm land. They must be doing something right. Syria should invest in effective water management schemes. Making syrians at the mercy of international food prices is wrong policy.
Tourism, in the context of third world countries, drives inflation up and turn the population into servants.
1. The need to import all agricultural products by 2025 does not mean that 100% of food consumption must be imported, it means that portions of all types of food will need to be imported. This may be 20% of grains, 10% of vegetables, etc…. THis is notwithstanding the fact that the numbers reflect population increase under the assumption of maintaining both the size and efficiency of current irrigation practice. Mr. Khouli’s “study” leaves half of the picture unexposed.
2. Since when tourism was a high paying job? Tourism is a high return investment, but never a high paying job, especially for the majority of its workers. Tourism means an expansion of service industry with many more waiters and waitresses than managers. Workers in tourism must remain close to the locations of their work (big cities), and urban slum belts will only become larger, with the only difference being that those living in these slums must leave their homes in the morning wearing cleaner clothes to please the tourists. This is not progress.
3. While I agree that the biggest threat to agriculture has been illegal and legal appropriation of fertile agricultural lands to urban sprawl, but that also is a double failure not of agricultural policy only but of an entire development policy based on arcane notion of strategic crops such as cotton.
4. Agriculture/Total water use ratios are almost the same worldwide except in countries where water is abundant but land is not. The number to look at is the (Agricultural Withdrawal)/(Total Renewable Supplies), which are harder to quantify. (FAO recognizes that in the opening paragraph introducing their famous AQUASTAT data base. That said, Syira’s ratio in the reference year of 2000 (72%) is rather high and is a sign of impending water crisis. But the solution of abandoning agriculture for tourism is misleading. Agricultural policies must be reviewed and they must be established in tandem with water use policies and water development policy. Such must include integrated management, development of basin authorities, abandoning cotton as a strategic crop, strict control of ground water resources, and incentive for adoption of modern technological advances that result in better irrigation efficiency. Cash crop are also labor intensive, and labor policy can be established to make jobs in agriculture as lucrative if not better than those in tourism.
There is much to be done before Syria abandons agriculture. Syria needs to support its agriculture by ensuring better water use efficiency.
Like everywhere in the world, tourism is totally dependent on political stability. The least incident drive the tourists out and leaves the country that depends too much on it, in the gutter.
Tourism bring forex but also often bring styles of life that are foreign and could be shocking to a conservative society (alcool, drugs, nudity etc..).
Tourism may disfigure ( it has already) the coastal areas with huge and ugly apartments blocks (Go an see what happen to the Coast of Turkey or Spain and Lebanon
The kind of tourism that Syria now has is religious and cultural and it should stay in this category. Most tourists are iranians and arabs, culturally close to Syria.
It seems Tony Alan’s virtual water theory is beginning to take shape in Syria. Indeed irrigated agriculture is the main culprit and a LOT can be done to improve its efficiency and especially the overexploitation of the groundwater aquifers by pumpwells. Diversification of economy would relieve a lot of pressure from these aquifers.
One note about Israel, while it is the most high-tech country in the Middle East with highly efficient agricultural systems, they do divert a lot of their water from the Sea of Galilee with their National Water Carrier. To the effect that, together with Syria and Jordan, Israel these three countries have managed to be the main cause why the River Jordan will probably DRY UP withou the next 2 YEARS !
It is interesting that at the same time international organizations are warning about a looming food crisis, some people want Syria to Abandon agriculture and switch to Tourism! I mean, is this even an argument? Do you think Syria can get 25 million tourists a year to create enough income and jobs to compensate for this switch? And even if we manage, tourism is highly unstable especially when you happen to be in the hottest region in the world and is also subject to change in the tastes of tourists. Many countries have embraced tourism, saw rapid growth in the sector, just to see the number of tourists decline as people started to discover new destinations.
Also, dear Khouli and Elie, Syria has always been an agricultural country (hell, agriculture started in Syria) and destroying agriculture will not only destroy the lifestyles of millions of Syrians but will also make us, as Why-Discuss, pointed out above some sort of post-war Lebanon. The most idiotic thing about this argument is the following sentence from Khouli article: