Conservation Agriculture: perspectives from Salamieh District, Syria

This paper broadens the role that conservation agriculture (CA) has, outside the realm of profitable agricultural production practices, sensitive to a range of environmental concerns and sustainability, to one of a catalyst for social development in fragile rural environments. Our focus is upon a rural district in central Syria, where increased frequency of drought and depleting groundwater tables continue to pose hardship for its residents and its economy. We argue that increasing water productivity and efficiency is a necessary, but not sufficient measure, to sustain agricultural livelihoods and rural communities. Instead, a fundamental shift in land use paradigms is required, and when appropriately designed, will implicitly lead to increases in water productivity and efficiency, in addition to other beneficial aspects of enhancing profitability and the productive capacity of the land that can spur agricultural, social and economic development. Our discussion is broadly applicable to those economies where regulatory environments restrict cropping patterns, where the vagaries of weather and poor historical production choices have diminished soil productive capacity, where there are strong crop-livestock interactions, and where civil society has been slow to take root.