WFP Concerned About Food Security in Syria

[Destroyed farm in Idlib, Sryia, in May 2012. Image by Freedom House via Flickr] [Destroyed farm in Idlib, Sryia, in May 2012. Image by Freedom House via Flickr]

WFP Concerned About Food Security in Syria

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the United Nations World Food Programme on 4 December 2012.]

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is warning that the recent escalation of violence in Syria is making it more difficult to reach the country’s hardest-hit areas and that food insecurity is on the rise due to bread shortages and higher food prices in many parts of the country. High prices are also affecting neighbouring countries hosting Syrian refugees.

  • Road access to and from Damascus has become more dangerous, making it difficult to dispatch food from WFP warehouses to some parts of the country -- particularly to the north. In the past few weeks, the UN food agency has seen increasing incidence of indiscriminate attacks on its trucks in different parts of the country.
  • In line with a UN decision to reduce the international staff working in Syria and as a result of the further escalation of violence in the country, WFP will relocate seven of its non-essential staff to Amman. Around twenty international and 100 national WFP staff remain in the country to carry out the emergency operation to feed 1.5 million vulnerable Syrians.
  • UN agencies, including WFP, have also temporarily suspended all field missions outside Damascus, which will negatively impact our ability to monitor food distributions by our partners and limit the movement of staff to conduct needs and market assessment missions
  • The food security situation for many Syrians is rapidly deteriorating with the intensification of the conflict and its expansion to more areas. Bread shortages are becoming more common, with long queues in front of bakeries, a shortage of fuel, damage sustained by bakeries, and an increased demand from fresh waves of internally displaced people.
  • In Aleppo, the majority of the population is now dependent on private bakeries where the price is forty to fifty percent higher compared to other governorates.
  • Most basic food items are still available in the market, but at higher prices. In areas of fighting, shortages of some food commodities have been observed while prices have almost doubled. In these areas access to the market is often curtailed.
  • WFP staff regularly monitoring food distributions in different parts of the country have also reported that food consumption is particularly low among displaced families taking refuge in schools and public buildings due to the lack of access to cooking facilities. Displaced families in rented homes who receive WFP food assistance report adequate food consumption but are running out of resources, having lost jobs and exhausted their life savings.
  • WFP is prioritizing food distributions to internally displaced Syrians who fled from areas which have seen heavy fighting in recent months – many of them have been displaced twice. Over eighty-five percent of the 1.5 million people receiving WFP’s food assistance are internally displaced– the majority taking shelter in public buildings such as schools and universities. The governorates of Rural Damascus, Aleppo and Al-Raqqa host the highest number of newly displaced people.
  • WFP launched an emergency operation in October 2011 and gradually scaled it up to feed 1.5 million people in all fourteen governorates with its main partner, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC).  To provide assistance to this number, WFP requires 15,000 metric tons of food on monthly basis at a cost of US$22 million.
  • The WFP monthly food basket contains fifty kilograms of mixed commodities, including rice, bulgur, vegetable oil, sugar, dried and canned pulses, pasta and salt. WFP was recently forced  to  reduce the size of its food rations due to funding challenges.
  • WFP is taking all measures to remain operational and provide much needed food assistance by increasing the number of armoured vehicles at its sub offices so that monitoring of its operations can continue safely.
  • Syrians continue to cross borders to neighbouring countries with 465,000 currently registered or awaiting registrations with UNHCR in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. Joint needs assessments in these countries showed that food was a top priority. WFP has provided food assistance to close to 160,000 refugees during October.
  • The Syrian crisis has also negatively impacted the food security situation of neighbouring countries which depend on food imports from Syria and cross border trade. Food prices in Jordan, for example, have increased due to the reduction of food imports by nearly fifty percent and increased demand from new arrivals from Syria. 
  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes
      Long Form Podcast(Episodes 7, 8, & 9) Upcoming Guests:Mandy TurnerHala RharritHatem Bazian Hosts:Mouin RabbaniBassam Haddad   Watch Here:Youtube.com/JadaliyyaX.com/Jadaliyya There can be

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412