Devastated by drought, Daraa’s olive harvest hits a new low

PARIS — When Daraa olive farmer Abu Hussam completed this year’s harvest, the scale of his losses became clear. His grove near Inkhil, a city in Syria’s southern Daraa province, produced just 1.5 tons of olives this year—barely six percent of the 25 tons he harvested in 2024. 

He is not alone. Throughout Daraa province, olive yields are down 68 percent this season: 10,000 tons, compared to 31,500 in 2024, according to figures Syria Direct obtained from the Daraa Agricultural Directorate. 

The effects of a changing climate in southern Syria—drought, shifting seasons and rising temperatures—are a major factor in the decline, agricultural experts and olive growers told Syria Direct. Other elements include a lack of agricultural resources and a farming sector damaged by years of war. The trouble reaches beyond olives: crops such as wheat, barley and tomatoes have also seen markedly smaller yields.

“The decline in olive production is not limited to Syria’s southern Daraa and Suwayda provinces alone,” Mwaffak Chikhali, a natural resource management consultant and general manager of a regional environmental consulting firm, told Syria Direct. “It has become a recurring phenomenon for years in most olive-producing parts of Syria.”

Shrinking harvests

“The current season is one of the worst in more than 20 years. The yield per olive tree has dropped by half compared to last year,” Muawiya al-Zoubi, who runs an olive grove and vineyard in eastern Daraa, told Syria Direct. “A field that produced 20 [16-kilogram] tanks of oil last season did not produce even 10 tanks this season—and some not even five.” 

Al-Zoubi’s family has been caring for their trees since the 1980s, when olive cultivation significantly expanded in Syria’s southern Houran region, and especially in the Daraa areas of Izraa, Sheikh Miskeen, Qarfa and Nawa. At the time, local varieties yielded abundant harvests, he said, with the exception of two years that saw trees damaged by heavy snow. In the 1990s, production was still “good,” and remained “acceptable” at the start of the new millennium in 2000.

But with the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, and increasing signs of a changing climate, the agricultural sector was hit hard, and harvests began to shrink. “The trees are not as they were before the war. They were affected by the bombing, projectiles and materials used then. People’s priority was safety, rather than caring for the trees,” al-Zoubi said. 

In 2018, al-Zoubi had to leave his two farms—in the area of al-Mlaiha al-Sharqiya and al-Dour in eastern Daraa—because of security conditions in the province. In 2021, he returned to his land, uprooted old trees and planted new groves with five varieties of olives. 

Despite the intensive care his trees receive, production fell this year. Al-Zoubi pointed to “high temperatures, drought, and a shift in rainfall seasons and their distribution” as well as a lack of “the hours of cold that olive trees need in the winter.” With changing weather conditions, “many plantings and varieties that were successful in the Houran in the 80s and 90s are no longer feasible today.” 

Ahmad al-Nassif, who lives in the northern Daraa city of Inkhil, has been leasing olive groves from farmers for 13 years through tadmin, cultivating the trees in exchange for providing the owners with rent or a share of the profits or crops. 

“The current season’s yield was no more than a quarter of last season,” al-Nassif told Syria Direct. “Some farms that produced 70 tons last season did not produce a single ton this year.” 

Over the past 13 years, the yields of some farms had increased each season, and the 2024 harvest was good. “This year the trees did not yield enough for the landowner’s personal use,” he said. 

“One farm produced 60 tons of olives last year, but only 50 kilograms this year,” because many trees bore no fruit at all, and “some dried up and died of thirst,” al-Nassif added. The “main problem is the lack of rain and severe heat waves that coincided with the flowering period” crucial for forming fruit, he added. Most farmers could not provide supplemental watering, and “the flowers fell.” 

After years of decline, Daraa’s 2025 olive harvest is 86 percent lower than the 2011 harvest. The land area planted with olives sharply declined between 2011 and 2022, while overall olive production dropped by nearly a quarter over the same period. 

As low yields cut into supply, the price of olive oil has shot up. One 16-kilogram tank of oil costs $111, compared to $50 last year, “and could rise to $150 due to a lack of production,” al-Nassif said. “All olive varieties were damaged this year, and many trees were hit by disease and pests” across southern Syria. 

Al-Nassif advised farmers not to plant new cultivars of olives, which have a “shorter lifespan and need irrigation and more care than traditional varieties native to the region.” Those “best suited to the Houran”—Syria’s fertile southern plain covering Daraa, Quneitra and parts of Suwayda—“and which have proven resistant to disease and drought are al-Jalt and Kalamata for table olives, and Sourani, Istanbuli and Manzalina for oil,” he said. 

Despite the overall decline in the harvest, the table olives Nayef al-Nayef grows at his orchard in Inkhil were an “exception” this season, maintaining good yields for a 12th year in a row. “Production is good this season, and better than the last,” he told Syria Direct. 

Al-Nayef attributed his own success to “constant attention in terms of fertilizer, pesticides and care” and—crucially—“good irrigation.” While many farmers could not provide enough water to see their trees through this year’s drought, he can provide water from a dedicated well “with a good flow, that is only for irrigating the olives.” 

“How you pick the olives plays a large role in the tree’s production the following year,” he added. “You must take care in dealing with the tree. Many farmers pick olives by hitting the tree with a cane or using a comb, but we pick each olive [by hand] so as not to break the branches.” 

Climate shifts

This year, Syria faced its most severe drought in more than 60 years, with rainfall at its lowest since 1997. Across the country, rain-fed crops suffered the heaviest damages, while irrigated crops fared somewhat better. In Daraa, just 151 millimeters of rain have fallen this year, down from 293.5 millimeters in 2024. 

Syria, like the rest of the Middle East, is experiencing temperature increases due to climate change, and is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. When less rain falls, or changing weather patterns bring rain very early or late in the season, many crops are impacted, including olives. 

“The trees no longer produce as well as they used to, since the distribution of rains is not right,” al-Zoubi said. “In the past, people planted olives without care, watered them once or twice a year, and they produced well. Today, the trees need care and effort to produce less than they did years ago.”

“Olive trees are native and long-lived in Daraa, but the climate conditions are no longer suitable for them, so they have to be compensated in terms of watering, irrigation, fertilizers and care in order to thrive,” he added. 

Read more: Dueling with drought: How can Daraa farmers adapt to a changing climate?

Amid this year’s drought, “there are trees that did not produce at all, especially in the second and third [agricultural] stability zones” corresponding to central and eastern Daraa, an agricultural engineer at the Daraa Agricultural Directorate told Syria Direct, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “Production was very low in the first stability zone [western Daraa]: five percent of last year’s,” he added. 

Most olives grown in Syria “are rain-fed cultivars, meaning they rely on seasonal rainfall to meet their water needs, with limited exceptions—particularly the varieties historically grown in Damascus’s Ghouta, the Palmyra oasis and some small-scale cultivation in a few provinces,” natural resource management consultant Chikhali said. 

Falling productivity in recent years “is primarily the result of thermal climatic changes, particularly waves of hot or relatively warm winds passing through the country earlier than usual, especially during the flowering period in March and April,” rather than late April and early May, Chikhali explained. These are the “khamsin winds, which usually come carrying dust and sand from the south and the southeast (the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt),” he added. 

When hot winds coincide with olive flowering, they cause “rapid drying of the blossoms, akin to burning, and they fall. This can sometimes affect the entire floral load of the trees,” he added.

The cumulative impact of drought, high temperatures and waves of hot air “may have caused the trees to enter states of physiological disturbance,” leaving them “unable to retain even the fruits that managed to overcome the drying period in March and April,” he added. By July and August, the trees were “exhausted from drought and summer heat, evident in the shedding of small, shriveled fruits during those months.” 

“High temperatures in August and even through the end of September negatively affect the physiology of the trees, as well as photosynthesis and respiration, which in turn affects the oil yield of the crop,” Chikhali said. 

Without supplemental irrigation to counterbalance the effects of higher temperatures, “the olive tree loses a large part of its photosynthetic efficiency, disrupting the balance between anabolic and catabolic processes and reducing the yield in terms of oil extraction percentage,” he added. 

Disease and pests

Relative to the recent past, “Daraa’s olive trees are in good health,” particularly since the 2018 settlement agreement, after which  farmers replanted their land with new olive trees to replace those that had been “cut for firewood, died or burned,” the source at the Daraa Agricultural Directorate said. 

However, this season a number of diseases and pests spread throughout the Houran, including fungal diseases. “We observed wilting in parts of most trees, especially the Nabali olive variety,” the agricultural engineer said. He attributed this to “olive wilt, a fungal disease caused by very high soil moisture, which has caused significant damage.”

Local agricultural officials also observed “a very limited spread of peacock eye leaf spot, a fungal disease whose environment is high humidity,” as well as “the olive psyllid insect, which spreads widely in the spring and destroys shoots and flowers, while affecting production to a small extent,” he added. “The olive moth, which affects newly planted trees and saplings and destroys new growth, was also observed to a considerable extent.” 

Olive bark borer insects also spread among most olive varieties, especially Nabali and Istanbuli trees, the engineer added. “The symptoms are similar to those of olive wilt, but while the common factor is stiffening branches, the [borer] can be distinguished by the presence of very small holes on the branches.” 

Nutrient deficiency “is apparent on the trees, since farmers do not apply sprays at the appropriate time, before the symptoms appear,” the agricultural engineer said. Additionally, “it is very rare for farmers to fertilize trees with composted organic fertilizers, as many do not have experience with their benefits.”

Changing weather, rising temperatures and decreased hours of cold “have led to an expanded spread of diseases” such as peacock eye, Chikhali added, as well as pests such as the olive fruit fly and cotton aphid. 

Years of war, sanctions and economic decline, coupled with “rampant corruption and administrative bloat, contributed to the decline of agricultural services for olive trees,” including chemical and organic fertilizers, tilling and pruning, Chikhali said. 

“The soil is depleted of nutrients needed for photosynthesis, resulting in a decline in the growth and formation of the new branches upon which more than 75 percent of the olive harvest is produced,” he added.

Drought and groundwater depletion, meanwhile, have driven up irrigation costs, leaving farmers paying “higher costs for poor economic returns,” olive grower al-Zoubi said. 

Read more: Drought, drilling, diversion: Daraa’s deepening water crisis

Groundwater levels have fallen “from 50 to 150 meters in the areas of Wadi al-Yarmouk, Tel Shehab, al-Muzayrib, Zayzoun, al-Ajami, al-Ashaari, Tafas and Jileen in western Daraa,” the agricultural engineer explained. The water available in existing wells has also significantly decreased. 

“Many wells have run dry in the western countryside, and there is a strong trend among farmers to move and invest in the eastern area,” he added. “The pomegranate crop in western Daraa has suffered catastrophic losses, reaching up to 90 percent, with fruit spoiling before ripening because the wells used to irrigate the trees dried up.”

Facing successive losses—due to continuing natural, human and economic factors—some farmers are giving up on olive cultivation, letting go of a piece of southern Syria’s agricultural heritage. To adapt to a new reality, they are turning to other trees, those “that produce early, bearing fruit in May, such as apricot and peach varieties,” the agricultural engineer said.

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.