In the past Syria knew of their high temperature climate, they might not have known how much hotter it was going to get over the years but it would have made sense to plan for a drought. Irrigation at the time may have seemed liked a reasonable thing to do, but they needed to start adjusting when they noticed water supply decreasing. Assuming there would be drought just focusing on water being used for citizens rather than agriculture reasons would have been wise. It is not ideal to have to import foods and other things but sometimes it is needed for them to survive, in order to do this it would be important to keep good external and internal relationships in the country. Irrigation takes up a lot of water that could be going to different people. Many people established jobs as farmers because the country did not take into consideration that water might not be a supply in later years. The country should have established a water system, close to what they have now with their underground water aquifers and made it strictly for bathing and drinking purposes. I think if I tried to make the water sources mainly for consumption and hygiene, leaving food to be imported it would be hard to convince the leaders to do this. I’m not sure how external relations were in the past but now it would be hard to convince them to rely on outside town and cities for their food. Now that I think about it, that could be hard on the citizens that are oppressed in the country because their food not be accessible in the country.
If this topic were to be turned into a research paper I would need to know the following:
- How Syria’s political climate was in the past
- What kind of farming they were doing, and what kind of farming can be done in such climate
- How the underground aquifers work in Syria
To learn about the past in Syria, I would take to some news sources along with peer reviewed articles that I would find on Albertson’s Library website. I’m a visual person so finding pictures of how the aquifers and what kinds of farming Syria did it would help me have more of an understanding of what they are dealing with.
Your response was very interesting to me as I feel like you thought outside the box and took a completely different approach ( I love that it made me really think!).
I think a key question is, has Syria ever had large stores of water? Where does their water come from? It seemed from the article that we read that Turkey has been hoarding water from the downstream countries.
Exports are huge for a countries GDP and could potentially help fund other water projects. My question to you is how would the country make money to import food and other goods? How would you present this plan to leadership to show them how it would work better than their current system? One key item for research might be the past and current economic conditions, if they do not export agricultural products what else would they export?
You mentioned this in your post. “How the underground aquifers work in Syria?”
This is something that I was interested in, I thought you brought up some good points in your post and I’m right there with you. I would like to know how those work in Syria, mainly because you can only imagine how complex they are. Also do you think politically they would enforce new rules to conserve water?