Hard rations in Syria’s food crisis

In Damascus, the Syrian capital, people are forced to queue overnight to buy bread. The queues stretch for hundreds of meters and are bounded by iron fences and chicken coops. People queuing are very close together. The mood is desperate.

It is the father of four Mohammed al-Khatib who describes the scene with the bread tails for DN. He recently witnessed it in front of the Ibn al-Amid bakery in Masaken Barzeh, a district in northern Damascus. He dares not use his real name in the interview: Mohammed al-Khatib is a pseudonym.

– When the fighting outside Damascus completely ended (2018), we thought the situation would improve. But every day now seems worse than the last, he says in a telephone conversation with DN, and continues:

– Bread is often the only food I can get for the family. And now we can only buy a kilo of bread a day. It feels like we’re trading our dignity for bread.

Bread is always an ingredient on the Syrian dining room table. And during the war years, bread has been the last blocking wall that guaranteed parents that their children would not starve. Now Bashar al-Assad’s regime has trouble getting it, and many other basic needs, to the people.

– The government’s rationing of bread is a clear sign of how suffocating daily life in Syria has become, 48-year-old Tamer Karkot, a prominent Syrian economic journalist, tells DN.

Besides bread they have SyriansIn recent months, he has experienced several recurring crises to be able to get home and cover basic needs, as well as heating and vehicle fuel, as well as electricity and even rent.

Inflation has reached an unprecedented level. The Syrian pound has lost more than 98 percent of its value ten years ago, the prices of many goods have become a hundred times higher, while average wages have only doubled. Also, there are no jobs.

Syria is now considered the poorest country in the world – 83 percent of Syrians are below the poverty line, 2019 figures from the UN show. And now the situation is much worse, according to the UN.

– At present, an estimated 9.3 million Syrians do not know where their next target foods will come from, that is, 1.4 million more than a year ago, and more than at any other time during the war. About a million of them are seriously concerned about food, double the number last year, and we expect that number to rise, said Ramesh Rajasingham, Under-Secretary-General of the UN Security Council, on November 25, 2020.

A Syrian employed by the government earns an average of £ 50,000 a month (equivalent to SEK 200). But with the current price level in Syria, a family of two adults and three children would need an income of 600,000 pounds a month, that is, twelve times more, to cover basic needs (food, rent, electricity, hygiene items and plus). It shows an investigation carried out by the Syrian workers’ organization.

How do people cope?

– Of course it doesn’t go hand in hand. Families could not survive if they did not receive the money sent by relatives abroad, says journalist Karkot and continues:

– Transfers are estimated at around a billion dollars a year, and most of them go through the black market.

As the Syrian civil war approaches its 10th year, al-Assad’s regime has finally lost most of its usual resources to finance public spending.

Exports have fallen dramatically since 2010, from nearly $ 8 billion a year to less than $ 1 billion this year. Ten years ago, petroleum and industrial products were exported; today, exports are limited to vegetables.

Syria’s wheat fields and oil wells are located in the northeastern part of the country. The areas controlled by the IS terrorist group between 2013 and 2018 and then by the Kurdish-led SDF militia with the support of the United States.

– The regime is very weak, economically and politically. It controls perhaps 85 percent of Syrian territory. But al-Assad has lost resources that make it difficult for his state to exist, Karkot said.

In 2020, the crisis of the crown, The Caesar Law, the cash crisis in Lebanon and the great explosion in the port of Beirut that caused the cup to overflow in the financial crisis of the regime.

President al-Assad has always blamed the crisis on US and European sanctions. But in early November, he surprisingly mentioned that the cessation of Syrian bank deposits in Lebanon is “the core of the current crisis in Syria.”

According to al-Assad, between $ 20 billion and $ 42 billion belonging to Syrians have disappeared in Lebanon this year. When Lebanon was hit by a severe financial collapse, the country’s Riksbank severely restricted cash withdrawals and transfers.

Until recently, Lebanon has been a backyard for the regime, which used it effectively for smuggling and circumventing sanctions. The crisis there and pressure from the United States have reduced it, Khaled Tirkawi, a Syrian economic researcher, tells DN.

– The United States has also imposed sanctions on Iran, which has limited Iran’s financial support to Syria.

Iran has given Syria credit limits of nearly $ 5 billion since 2013 against investments in Syria.

Now that the regime’s allies does not offer sufficient financial support, and that Syria’s hard currency reserve (equivalent to $ 18-20 billion in 2011) has disappeared, and economic sectors; agriculture, industry, tourism and trade with the outside world almost completely collapsed, al-Assad has been forced to find new ways to finance the state and the ongoing war.

In recent months, Syria has issued several new laws and measures to earn money in dollars.

In November, al-Assad issued a decree allowing Syrians to escape military service if they paid the equivalent of $ 10,000.

A Syrian passport costs up to $ 800 for those living abroad. The regime earned $ 21.5 million in passport fees this year, according to the interior minister.

The regime has also seized every opportunity provided by the crisis in the crown to accumulate viable currency. The return fee and the PCR test are some of the crown-related measures that Syrian travelers have to pay a lot for when arriving in dollars.

Many Syrian-owned properties and agriculture located outside the government-controlled areas were confiscated by the regime or auctioned for investment.

But the largest sum is estimated in the billions that al-Assad forced his loyal billionaires of businessmen, like his cousin Rami Makhlouf, to pay. The government has also confiscated the money of ministers and governors, and at the same time promised small businessmen that they can avoid penalties if they immediately pay taxes for their activities.

But how long can al-Assad stay in power during this recent economic crisis that has further weakened him?

– Recently more demonstrations have broken out against the deterioration of the living situation in typically loyal areas. Protests may escalate. But protests and sanctions have never toppled a regime like the Syrian one, Tirkawi said.

The Middle East has experienced this in several cases, as in the case of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And the al-Assad regime still has a very strong security police force.

– The continuation of the regime in the future is due to its good relationship with the allies that support it militarily and politically, says Karkot, who believes that al-Assad knows absolutely that there is no real desire in the West to overthrow him, and therefore “play the game” skillfully and wisely.

At the refugee conference held in the capital Damascus in November, and boycotted by the EU and the United States, Russia declared that it will allocate a billion dollars for the reconstruction of Syria. The sum is one of the 400 billion that Syria needs for reconstruction, according to the UN.

– The Syrian economy is in shambles and there is not much to build on. Therefore, a comprehensive economic renaissance is needed and reconstruction cannot take place without a political transition and national reconciliation, says Khaled Tirkawi.