The politics of bread and micropolitical resistance (2)
The political economy of bread in Syria
This section analyzes the political economy of bread in Syria since the Baath party rise to power in 1963. It provides a brief historical account of the political, economic, and environmental cost of providing low-priced bread to pacify the population. Agriculture was the main economic activity in Syria until the mid-1970s. By 2010, it still represented 15 percent of the GDP and 800,000 worked in this sector of the economy, representing 17 percent of the labor force.44 Prior to the uprising, the livelihood of 80 percent of the rural population, representing 8 million Syrians, depended on agriculture.45
When the Baath party took power in 1963, seven years before Hafez al-Assad’s coup d’état, one of its priorities was to alter the food economy in Syria. Wheat and cotton became the two most important crops for the government. Cotton was a cash crop that brought much-needed hard currency, at least up until the industrial extraction of oil in 1974. Wheat had also a strategic importance but for different reasons. The regime’s goal was to maintain basic commodities at a low cost to prevent urban rebellions. Since bread provides 40 percent of caloric consumption of the average family,46 the regime turned the production of wheat into a national priority. It gradually created self-sufficiency in wheat production and reduced reliance on imports. It allocated important resources and changed the structure of agriculture to achieve that aim.47 It enacted changes at different levels in the chain of production to reduce the cost of bread for the consumer. By the mid-1990s, the regime reached its goal of producing enough wheat for domestic consumption but the economic and environmental costs were high. Starting in the 1990s, the Syrian state began exporting some of the wheat surplus.48
The state utilized multiple strategies to encourage farmers to grow wheat, including the expansion of irrigated areas, subsidizing seeds and fertilizers, and buying peasants’ production at a fixed premium cost. It focused its attention on four northern provinces, namely, al-Hasakah, Deir az-Zor, ar-Raqqa, and Aleppo, which produced three-quarters of the wheat. Despite the Baath party’s decision to increase the production of wheat to reach self-sufficiency, the total output was fluctuating enormously up until 1989. During the period of instable production, it reached a low of 0.56 million tonnes in 1966, and a high of 2.24 million tonnes in 1980.49 Starting in 1989, the output increased steadily to reach self-sufficiency in 1995 with a production in excess of 4 million tonnes.50 Over the following 20 years, the production was mostly stable, up until the Syrian uprising in 2011.
To increase wheat production, the state expanded the irrigated areas and encouraged farmers to grow wheat instead of other crops. The Syrian state embarked on an ambitious developmentalist program and made the construction of dams one of its cornerstones. In 1963, when the Baath party seized power, there were no dams in Syria. By 2001, their number rose to 160, and they mostly provided irrigation water for agriculture, while some supplied electricity and water to households. Approximately one-quarter of the budget was spent on agriculture, a large segment of which was allocated to building large hydrological projects.51 The construction of the Euphrates Dam, one of the largest projects, began in 1968 and was completed in 1973. These hydrological infrastructures are not simply economic but primarily political. Geographer Jessica Barnes explains,
[w]hile portrayed as a technical project, dam construction also has political dimensions. The ability to rearrange the natural and social environment through dam construction demonstrates the strength of the modern state as a techno-economic power. The large Euphrates Dam exemplifies this political motive, designed as a showpiece of Ba’thism to demonstrate the engineering prowess of the Ba’thist state. In addition, the concentration of water resources behind a dam creates a site that can be politically controlled. The police guard tower located at each major irrigation infrastructure in Syria is a visual manifestation of this political control.52
As Barnes suggests, the power of the state should not be reduced to its military or police forces. It is essential to understand the networks of irrigation as well as the construction of dams as part of the technologies of power that the state deployed effectively in Syria since the mid-1960s.
In 1998, wheat was cultivated on over 34 percent of the total agricultural land. Thirty percent of the land was irrigated and produced approximately 60 percent of the wheat, while the remaining 70 percent depended on precipitation. In 1990, most irrigated land, around 64 percent, was used to grow wheat and cotton. This percentage increased to 80 percent in 2000.53 In addition, the state encouraged farmers growing cotton on irrigated land, to turn their attention to wheat production.
During the first phase of liberalization in the late 1980s, all restrictions on well construction were removed, doubling their number in a few years. In 2000, when Bashar al-Assad launched the second phase of liberalization, the same phenomenon occurred again. The regime allowed the number of wells to grow from approximately 130,000 in 2000 to 230,000 in 2010. Most of these wells were located in the north, the region of most wheat production.54 These wells had devastating ecological effects but were not enough to hamper the impact of the last wave of drought, which lasted several years, in 2006–2009.
The impact of the drought was drastic and led to the loss of 800,000 jobs, which in turn triggered massive internal displacement. Many of the disfranchised peasants ended up living in informal housing and slums in the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo. This massive displacement of population was combined with economic liberalization that Assad initiated in the late 1980s, and which his son accelerated in the early 2000s.
The drought destroyed innumerable jobs, while economic liberalization increased the price of basic commodities. In addition, it explains the process of deterritorialization of peasants, who had been previously captured by the state assemblage, starting in the 1960s, but who were then uprooted by the drought and economic liberalization. The capitalist logic of the late 1980s and early 2000s freed many peasants and turned them into mobile cheap labor. Many ended up living in informal housing on the peripheries of large cities. The peasants, who initially benefited from land reform and were considered the loyal base of the regime, were gradually marginalized to the point of becoming major actors in the geography of the revolts since 2011.
From wheat production to bread supply
To organize the production of bread, the Syrian state created the General Company for Mills (GCM) in 1975, while the General Company for Baking (GCB) was established a decade later, in 1986.55 The creation of the GCB coincides with the first wave of liberalization of the economy. While the regime began reversing land reform, and allowing private capital to enter the countryside, it also wanted to maintain its control of bread prices through the GCB. The creation of the GCB in the mid-1980s shows that the state had shifted its focus from wheat production to bread supply at a subsidized price. Instead of producing the wheat itself, the Syrian state began subsidizing peasants’ production extensively. The GCM bought an average of 2.5 million tonnes of wheat per year from farmers and kept a strategic stock of 3 million tonnes56 in its silos for food security. The price of wheat was determined by the government and has always been much higher than the price on the international market.
The GCM, which could process up to 1.8 million tonnes of flour per year, began contracting private mills to process the remaining quantity, which was needed to provide bread to a growing population. In 2000, for example, it contracted 13 private mills, mostly located in Aleppo, Hama, and Homs to produce 385,000 tonnes of flour.57 The GCB sold flour at a subsidized price to public and private bakeries, which were required to provide bread to the consumer at a fixed price. The price of bread was fixed by the government, regardless of the price of wheat. In 1999, the GCM spent $256.03 million to subsidize the wheat and provide it at a low price to bakeries.58 These subsidies represented 3.8 percent of the GDP that same year.59
The purpose of the agricultural infrastructure is to entrap peasants and reduce their autonomy to a maximum. The extensive construction of dams and other projects linked to agriculture, namely, agricultural chemicals, networks of mills, and bakeries, should be understood as the consolidation of the Baath’s infrastructural power. This form of power is much more effective than coercive force because it restricts the realm of the possible for peasants while also dissuading them from rebelling. The rural population is by definition difficult to control since it is dispersed throughout the territory and is far from urban centers where the might of the state is concentrated. Access to agricultural resources, such as irrigation water or fuel for wells, required loyalty to the regime, whether it was real or simulated.60
The politics of bread since 2011
The Syrian regime faced a major bread crisis when the Uprising began. A number of factors should be evoked here to explain this critical and multilayered crisis. There are at least three important factors that help understand the bread crisis. The first challenge the regime faced was the loss of Northern Syria where 70–80 percent of the wheat is produced. Second, the government diverted most of its resources to the war effort and as such was unable to subsidize the bread economy as it used to in the past. Finally, Syria faced an ecological crisis due to overexploitation of the land and water resources. The impact of this crisis on agriculture was drastic.
In 2014, the land available for agriculture dropped from 1.7 to 1.2 million hectares due to the ongoing war. That same year, Syria’s wheat production was one of the worst in recent years dropping below the 3 million tonnes threshold, which had happened only twice: between 1995, when self-sufficiency was achieved, and 2011, when the revolt began.61 Since 2011, the Syrian government has lost most of Northern Syria, which represents the cereal belt of the country. This region is Syria’s food basket and used to produce around 80 percent of the wheat. In 2012, it was forced to import on average 100,000 tonnes of wheat every month.62
The combined impact of these developments led to a steep increase in bread prices in regime-controlled areas.63 Since 2011, the Assad regime abandoned the idea of wheat being a strategic commodity. The policy was first introduced in 1975 and remained of central importance until the eruption of the revolt. From that time, the Syrian government stopped allocating substantial resources to maintain control of the cereal basket in the North. In 2015, it announced that it would focus its efforts on maintaining control over “Useful Syria,”64 a territory the regime deems vital and which includes Aleppo and Damascus, as well as the coastal areas located between the two cities.
Since Northern Syria is outside the perimeter of Useful Syria, evidently the regime did not consider its agricultural production was worth fighting for. In 1975, the regime declared wheat as a strategic commodity, and food security as a priority. It developed policies and built massive irrigation networks, and many dams to achieve that goal. When the population rebelled in 2011, the regime turned wheat from a strategic commodity into a weapon of mass destruction. Not only did it cease to provide it to a large segment of the population, in addition, it burnt wheat fields on a large scale.65
The regime’s war efforts have prevented it from utilizing a large share of the budget to subsidize bread. As mentioned above, for several decades, the Syrian state used to pay a premium price to farmers and buy their wheat production. The state imported wheat only when the strategic stock fell under a certain threshold value. State protectionism was maintained for several decades and it gave Syrian farmers the incentive to produce wheat without the fear of losing money, since the production was always bought by the state with a margin of profit varying between 20–30 percent. This policy maintained the price of wheat well above the international price. In the end, what mattered for the Syrian government was to provide bread at a low price.
In addition to these economic factors, the regime was also facing a major ecological crisis. In 2006–2010, there were several droughts, which amplified the crisis of wheat production. Gianluca Serra, who spent a decade working with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Syria, explains that the regime used the droughts as a pretext to avoid taking responsibility for the decline in wheat production. In reality, the droughts were due in large part to the state’s reckless management of the land and water as well as the ecological crises that ensued. He explains that the crisis:
… began in 1958 when the former Bedouin commons were opened up to unrestricted grazing. That led to a wider ecological, hydrological and agricultural collapse, and then to a “rural intifada” of farmers and nomads no longer able to support themselves.66
The Syrian regime conveniently used the argument of natural drought to deny the over-exploitation of the land and refute taking responsibility for the current crisis. A number of studies have shown that over-exploitation, the construction of wells, and other policies encouraged by the state, have led to the desertification of large territories.67
Manbij: a case study
In July 2012, revolutionary forces liberated Manbij peacefully, a city of 200,000 inhabitants in Northern Syria. For almost a year, neighborhood groups had organized small and large protests and creative peaceful actions until they managed to expel security and police forces from their city. After liberation, they formed a revolutionary council and began working relentlessly to make their city liveable, despite the ongoing violence they were facing. The city and its inhabitants reinvented every institution and came up with creative ways to solve everyday problems.
The revolutionary council and active groups in the city began a process of de-Baathification by deploying a combination of traditional knowledge and decolonial practices. By governing the city, they also faced a myriad of problems in a context of acute poverty and weekly airstrikes whose aim was to prevent normal life after liberation. The politics of bread in Manbij is important because it highlights the challenges facing revolutionary groups as they attempt to create a self-sufficient economy.
The production and distribution of bread outside the regime’s networks constituted a direct threat to its survival. For almost half a century, the regime imposed a simple equation in Syria, according to which cheap bread would be available as long as the population refrains from participating in the political process or criticizing the Assad regime. It built a complex infrastructure that includes dams, irrigation networks, seeds, fertilizers, as well as mills and bakeries to control every aspect of the bread economy. It made it virtually impossible for peasants to escape its infrastructural power, while consumers were provided with cheap bread. After 2011, cities such as Manbij began to challenge the regime’s narrative by building autonomous circuits of bread. The production of bread in the liberated areas was threatening the regime’s infrastructural power and as such were often targeted by its jets. Building a bread economy outside the government networks was simply not permitted.
The creation of an independent circuit of bread is a challenging task. Not only does it require the deterritorialization of processes that have been in place for more than half a century, there is also need for a nomadic assemblage that reterritorializes the new processes. Revolutionaries have to dismantle the state assemblage and create a more democratic and egalitarian one.
In the section below, I explore the micropolitics of bread and the ways it was operationalized in the city. The politics of bread sheds light on the strategies adopted by the population to delink from the regime’s ubiquitous infrastructural power. In addition, it shows how the regime responded to prevent the emergence of a nomadic assemblage outside the purview of the state. Thomas Nail explains that a nomadic assemblage “constructs a participatory arrangement in which all the elements of the assemblage enter into an open feedback loop in which the condition, elements, and agents all participate equally in the process of transformation.”68 In what follows, I present some of the strategies and counter-strategies deployed in the 18-month period (July 2012–January 2014), during which the revolutionary council controlled the city.
Manbij has one of the largest flourmills in Northern Syria, making the city vital and strategic for the entire region. The mills can process up to 450 tonnes of wheat a day, a quantity sufficient for 1 million inhabitants. After the liberation of the city, the regime kept providing Manbij with wheat to maintain the state assemblage in place. In addition, the director of the mills, and approximately 100 employees were kept on the regime’s payroll.
The revolutionary council was initially unable to provide wheat at a low cost, or pay salaries, and as a result was forced to accept the regime’s indirect presence in the city and the dangerous consequences of such a policy. While Manbij had dozens of brigades fighting the regime, it did not have the resources to completely dismantle the state assemblage present in the city. When the director of the mills threatened to leave due to repeated disputes with various powerful actors in the city, the revolutionary council created a team of volunteers to shadow the mills’ technicians and engineers and gain the necessary skills to operate the mills independently and avoid a possible starvation of the population in the event the director or the employees decided to leave.
Targeting bakeries
In December 2012, the regime began an airstrike campaign in several cities targeting people waiting at bread lines in front of bakeries and gas stations. The violence terrorized the population and undermined post-Assad alternatives in liberated areas.69 To counter the regime’s indiscriminate killing machine, the revolutionary council in Manbij, after deliberations with various actors in the city, decided to distribute bread in different neighborhoods to avoid gatherings in front of bakeries. It hired a large number of young men looking for jobs and assigned them to different neighborhoods to distribute bread.
To prevent the selling of bread on the black market at exorbitant prices, the council gathered extensive data about the number of families and their needs in every neighborhood and rationed bread accordingly. This process allowed the council to decentralize the distribution of bread and hence end long waiting times in front of bakeries as well as prevent the regime from attacking crowds at these locations. The bread census provided vital spatial data about the city and its inhabitants. The new process prevented individuals from buying large amounts of bread and selling it at a higher price on the black market.
One of the setbacks, however, is that new refugees were not accounted for in the census and, thus, could not buy subsidized bread; as a result, they were forced to pay twice or three times the price of bread on the black market. These processes demonstrate the difficulty of erecting a nomadic assemblage in the liberated regions.
The geography of bread
Mills and bakeries were vital institutions under Assad’s rule but they became more so in the liberated areas since 2011, as bread grew into a crucial staple for most Syrians, who often relied on it for their survival. With the liberation of Manbij, the revolutionary council made the provision and distribution of bread, and the protection of the city from the regime’s ground attacks, a main priority. In reality, bread and freedom are inseparable: the liberation of a city is meaningless in the eyes of its inhabitants, if the living conditions worsen as a result. The council was fully aware that success or failure depended on whether it could provide bread at the same price as in regions controlled by the regime. Likewise, the regime understood the revolution would be meaningless if it is unable to provide bread to the populations living in the liberated areas.
The revolutionary council created a special committee to examine the various scenarios and propose strategies to make bread available at a low cost. It was able to solve the problem of bread sold on the black market but was still facing other major problems. After the liberation of the city, large numbers of military brigades were formed to fight the regime. In some cases, powerful families and clans created their own groups to defend their interests and maintain influence in the city and surrounding areas. These brigades were known as “the bread brigades” as they did not fight the regime but had the same privileges as the ones who did. FSA groups could not wait in line for long hours to get bread because they needed to return to the front promptly. The population in Manbij was critical of the bread brigades but was unable to stop them.
Another issue arose quickly after the liberation of the city. The revolutionary council wanted to prevent powerful military groups present in the city from controlling the mills and monopolizing the distribution of bread. The mills were difficult to guard as they were located on the outskirts of the city, making them vulnerable to attacks and as such, an easy target for belligerent military groups. For example, when Ahrar al-Sham, a powerful jihadist group, forcefully took control of the mills under the pretext that the management was corrupt and lacked financial transparency. The council then organized a successful campaign to get them out of the mills. By providing bread at a low cost, the leader of Ahrar al-Sham believed his group would gain the population’s loyalty. His plan backfired, however, as the entire city opposed military involvement in civilian affairs and did not approve of the forceful way the group had taken the mills. The council and several powerful groups in the city put all their differences aside and organized several protests until Ahrar al-Sham were forced to leave the mills.
From the local to the regional
To end the city’s dependency on the regime, the revolutionary council began building an alternative circuit of wheat in the liberated regions by creating a geography of solidarity. This new geography required the liberated cities to share the benefits and burdens of dividing up the wheat equally among the different regions. The new circuit of wheat did not always work smoothly because revolutionary councils in the liberated region had to maintain a subtle balance between specific local demands and an elusive regional strategy. For example, Raqqa’s local council refused to lend Manbij its expensive equipment to fix a power cut, despite the good relationship between the two cities. The former feared that a corrupt FSA group would steal the equipment at a checkpoint between the two cities. Manbij’s revolutionary council responded by threatening to cut the water supply and stop providing bread to Raqqa’s western countryside, thus putting enough pressure on the neighboring city to finally lend its equipment.
The scarcity of resources and the presence of multiple military groups with divergent agendas made cooperation between various revolutionary councils a main challenge. This incident, and others, shows that democratic governance at a local level is not easily transposable to a larger regional scale.
Bread as a weapon of war
While the revolutionary processes were producing a nomadic assemblage in the city, the regime was brutally destroying it. The regime used bread to strangle the revolutionary process in Manbij. When it was not able to control the economy of bread in the city anymore, it began targeting it violently. For example, the regime began bombing bread lines in front of bakeries in summer 2012.70 It besieged areas controlled by the opposition and starved the communities inhabiting them. In addition, the regime bought wheat from areas controlled by the opposition by proposing a higher price. It was granted a line of credit by the Iranian regime to do so.
According to the most recent estimates, more than 50 percent of the areas that produce wheat were under the control of the opposition in 2015. Some farmers sell their crops to a middleman who then smuggles them to a neighboring country such as Iraq or Turkey.71 The regime targeted the Rashediah food warehouse and regularly burned wheat production in areas controlled by the opposition. These processes, in addition to the ongoing war, left more than 50 percent of the Syrian population in need of food assistance in 2015, according to FAO. This number was only at 5 percent before the revolution.72
Conclusion
The chapter examines the history of the agrarian reform and its implications on the rural population. Before the revolts, the regime built a politics of bread that would prevent dissent and contain rebellion. The chapter illustrates the power of infrastructural control, which refers to the infrastructure used for the production of bread. It includes dams, irrigation networks, seeds, fertilizers, bakeries, and mills, and which together form the state assemblage. This form of decentralized power captures spaces that were previously outside its preview and turns them into networks of control. The regime created a state assemblage in the countryside, which produced dependency among the peasantry. As a result, all aspects of agriculture depended on the state, while peasants could not survive without the assemblage. This form of power is more effective than military force as it requires little manpower to maintain.
Land distribution destroyed the feudal order but it simultaneously created a peasantry that is highly dependent on state resources (dams, seeds, fertilizers, irrigation networks, credit, etc…). The state logic progressively incorporated the market logic. It gradually substituted the state assemblage with a capitalist assemblage, especially when Bashar al-Assad seized power in 2000. The Baath began reversing the land reform and large segments of the peasantry was forced to leave the countryside and join the disposable industrial reserve army in the large cities.
The state and capitalist assemblages became ineffective when the 2011 revolt erupted. The regime tried to contain the rebellion but as its scope broadened, Assad began deploying a lethal strategy aimed at eliminating all forms of opposition. Wheat, which was used to pacify the population in the past several decades, quickly became a weapon of mass destruction—and one in which bread played a central role. Finally, revolutionaries in Manbij developed strategies to delink the economy of bread from the state assemblage. Despite the revolutionary council’s failure to build a sustainable economy, the practices that emerged around the production, circulation, and consumption of bread provide valuable lessons for the future.
Notes
44. “Agriculture: Syrian food basket from retreat to disaster,” Harmoon.-سلة-الزراعة/September 2017. Accessed July 4, 2019. https://harmoon.org./التراجع-من-السورية-الغذاء
45. “Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Syrian Arab Republic,” FAO/WFP. July 5, 2013. Accessed June 2, 2019, 9. www.fao.org/docrep/018/aq113e/aq113e.pdf.
46. Ibid., 21.
47. “Syrian Civil War cut wheat harvest to its worst level,” World Bulletin, July 25, 2013. Accessed June 1, 2019. www.worldbulletin.net/news/113852/syrian-civil-war-cut-wheat-harvest-to-its-worst-level.
48. “Syrian Arab Republic wheat production by year,” Index Mundi. Accessed June 5, 2019. www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=sy&commodity=wheat&graph=production.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Jessica Barnes, “Managing the waters of Ba’th country: the politics of water scarcity in Syria,” Geopolitics 14, no. 3 (2009), 524.
52. Ibid., 525.
53. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “Syrian agriculture at the crossroads,” (2003), 101. Accessed June 1, 2019. www.napcsyr.gov.sy/dwnld-files/fao_publications/sac/syrian_agriculture_at_the_cross_roads_en.pdf.
54. Aden Aw-Hassana, Fadel Ridab, Roberto Telleria, and Adriana Bruggeman, “The impact of food and agricultural policies on groundwater use in Syria,” Journal of Hydrology 513, (May 26, 2014): 204–15.
55. “The General Company for Mills.” Accessed July 18, 2019. http://mills.gov.sy.
56. Maha El Dahan and Jonathan Saul, “Syria taps world wheat market as stocks run down,” Reuters. March 30, 2015. Accessed June 7, 2019. www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/30/syria-food-imports-idUSL5N0W81PQ20150330.
57. FAO, “Syrian agriculture at the crossroads,” 41.
58. Ibid., 42.
59. Ibid., 48.
60. See Lisa Wedeen, “Acting ‘as if ’: the story of M,” in Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, 1st edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
61. Adnan Abdul Razak, “Syria’s wheat crop is the worst in 40 years,” Al-Araby. June 24, 2013. Accessed June 28, 2019. www.alaraby.co.uk/economy/.عاما-40-منذ-الأسوأ-هو-سورية-في-القمح-محصول/2014/6/24
62. “Bread shortages rising,” The New Humanitarian. December 13, 2012. Accessed June 3, 2019. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2012/12/13/bread-shortages-rising.
63. “Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Syrian Arab Republic,”https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/special-report-faowfp-crop-and-food-security-assessment-mission-syrian-3.
64. Sam Heller, “How Assad is using sieges and hunger to grab more of the ‘Useful Syria,’” Vice. January 14, 2016. Accessed May 2, 2019. www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xadz9/how-assad-is-using-sieges-and-hunger-to-grab-more-of-the-useful-syria.
65. Mohammad Kanfash and Ali al-Jasem, “Syrians are watching their crops burn. These crimes of starvation must end,” Guardian. July 11, 2019. Accessed July 27, 2019. www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jul/11/syrians-are-watching-their-crops-burn-these-starvation-crimes-must-end.
66. Gianluca Serra, “Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe are the root causes of war,” The Ecologist. June 5, 2015. Accessed July 2, 2019. www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2871076/overgrazing_and_desertification_in_the_syrian_steppe_are_the_root_causes_of_war.html.
67. Jan Selbya, Omar S. Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulmee, “Climate change and the Syrian Civil War revisited,” Political Geography 60 (September 2017): 232–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.05.007.68. Nail, “What is an Assemblage?”, 33.
69. “Syria: government attacking bread lines,” Human Rights Watch. August 30, 2012. Accessed June 29, 2019. www.hrw.org/news/2012/08/30/syria-government-attacking-bread-lines.
70. Ibid.
71. “Syria sees money in bumper harvest, but getting to it is hard,” Reuters. May 20, 2015. Accessed June 3, 2019. www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/20/mideast-crisis-syria-wheat-idUSL5N0YA3VB20150520.
72. Ibid.
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