Syria is expected to produce 2.17 million tonnes of local wheat in the 2017 season; this is nearly one million tonnes more than in the previous year.
The wheat estimation was announced by the minister of agriculture, Ahmad al-Qadiri, to the state news agency SANA.
Syria’s wheat harvest fell by almost half to 1.3 million tonnes last year, its lowest in 27 years, as fighting and poor rainfall further degraded the farming sector and the nation’s ability to feed itself.
Before the outbreak of its six-year-old civil war, Syria was a wheat exporter producing four million tonnes in a good year and able to export 1.5 million tonnes. Even with the 2017 harvest, the amount of wheat is still too low to provide bread to government-held areas.