Marginalized and underpaid, women work Deir e-Zor’s fields

DEIR E-ZOR — Hind al-Ali, 18, spends her days working on farmland near the informal camp where she lives on the outskirts of the western Deir e-Zor village of Hawaij Bumasa. For each hour she works, she makes 3,000 Syrian pounds ($0.20) to put towards “my school expenses and help my family with household needs,” she told Syria Direct. 

While other young people her age spend their summer holidays with “recreational activities or taking a break,” al-Ali leaves her camp in the early morning to work a full, eight-hour day. During the school year she works part time, going to work at seven o’clock in the morning and starting class at 11. 

Many women and girls in the Deir e-Zor countryside spend their days working the fields for meager wages. Like al-Ali, they find few other opportunities to make ends meet and get by amid deteriorating living conditions in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)-controlled area. 

Farmworkers harvest wheat and barley by hand with a scythe, grow and pick summer and winter vegetables and spend hours weeding. They work under the burning summer sun and shiver in the winter cold, with no healthcare guarantees if they are injured on the job. 

Recent years saw a series of demonstrations in SDF-held areas of Deir e-Zor calling for better living conditions and services, fuel supplies, health facilities and improvements to the education sector. Despite the protests, little has changed on the ground. 

Wage gap

Fatima al-Ahmad (a pseudonym), 22, who lives in a western Deir-e-Zor village, said the local foreman—who coordinates with landowners to employ farmworkers and transport them to and from the work site—tends to employ women over men. “They don’t haggle much over wages and accept work for SYP 3,000 an hour, which is only enough to buy vegetables at the end of the day,” she told Syria Direct. 

Men, by contrast, tend to work irrigating the land, “which is the easier task in agricultural work,” or harvest crops “using machine harvesters, for very good wages compared to women,” al-Ahmad, a mother of three, said. Combine harvester drivers make $10 per dunum of land, she added. 

Women farmworkers also carry a double burden. Early every morning, the foreman’s vehicle comes to transport al-Ahmad and others “to the work site, in nearby villages or sometimes farther.” As soon as they return from the fields, women set about their household chores, “cleaning, preparing food and caring for children,” she added. 

Hourly farm labor is not a new system, and exists everywhere in Syria, not just Deir e-Zor. However, since 2011 it has become “work limited to women,” several sources in the northeastern province told Syria Direct. Wages in this sector are low, while prices rise and the exchange rate of the pound—currently SYP 14,650 to the dollar on the black market—plummets.

With salaries so low for farm work, men and boys tend to refuse it, seeking more profitable jobs that women cannot do for social or professional reasons. With few other options, farm work falls to women who need work regardless of the conditions or wages. 

Economic despair and a lack of opportunities drives many young men to emigrate, leaving northeastern Syria for neighboring countries or Europe. For women, their chances of migrating are far lower, al-Ali said, her hands showing the effects of hard labor. Her two brothers “are preparing to travel to Lebanon to work there,” she told Syria Direct. 

Because she does not have a degree or trade, Hiba Khalaf (a pseudonym), a woman in her 20s living in western Deir e-Zor’s al-Muhaimida village, does not mind working in agriculture for an hourly salary of SYP 3,000 at best, she said. 

Khalaf previously heard of some projects by local civil society organizations and tried to sign up for one, but was not accepted. She believes the refusal was “because of the spread of nepotism and the monopolization of some jobs by influential families within a single clan,” an assertion Syria Direct could not verify. 

“Uneducated women in Deir e-Zor have no choice but to work the land,” Khalaf, a mother of three and a sole breadwinner after the death of her husband, said.

‘Their rights are squandered’

Farmer Yahya al-Muhammad, from Hawaij Bumasa, acknowledged “the low wages that do not match the great effort the workers exert.” However, he attributed this to “the losses farmers incur due to high agricultural costs.” 

“There is no party to compensate [farmers] for heavy losses in the event of pest invasion or fires,” the farmer told Syria Direct. High costs and high risks drove him to “reduce the cultivated area from seven dunums to three this year” on his land, he added. 

Ahmad al-Omar, 35, a farmer in the western Deir e-Zor village of al-Kasra, said farmers struggle with high irrigation costs, as most draw water from wells using diesel-fueled pumps. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which administers the area, allocates quantities of subsidized fuel and pesticides for farmers, but has not provided the promised amount. As a result, farmers have to “buy black market fuel,” which “affects setting wages for laborers,” he said. 

Al-Muhammad has also reduced the cultivated area of his land, from 30 dunums before 2011 to just seven this year. 

Read more: Fuel crisis and weak subsidies threaten Syria’s northeastern bread basket

Ultimately, women farmworkers are the weakest link in northeastern Syria’s agricultural system, paying the price for a deteriorating agricultural sector and declining farmer incomes. Meanwhile, their profession has no oversight, and there are no laws or decisions preserving their rights or guaranteeing fair compensation and safety. 

At best, women working full time in this sector earn around SYP 600,000 ($40) a month, while the minimum monthly wage in AANES institutions stands at SYP 1 million ($68).

On top of that, many women risk their lives working land near lines of contact, as in the case of Umm Muhammad, 35, from al-Zaghir village in western Deir e-Zor, who works on farmland in SDF-held areas near regime-held territory. “The area sees clashes between the two sides from time to time,” she said. 

Speaking to Syria Direct while trying to wash the mud out of a dress stained during a hard day’s work, Muhammad recalled an incident in which a fellow farmworker was killed “when she was hit by a bullet of unknown origin.” 

The incident “made me more afraid, but I risk my life to support my children,” the mother of three said. 

The SDF controls territory on the eastern side of the Euphrates River running through Deir e-Zor, while regime and pro-Iran groups control territory to the west. The area periodically sees sniper attacks, infiltration operations and shelling between the two sides. 

On August 7, Arab tribal forces backed by the Syrian regime and Iranian militias launched a large-scale attack on SDF areas in eastern Deir e-Zor, leading to the death and injury of scores of civilians and displacing people living on the line of contact. 

Read more: Deir e-Zor civilians under fire as regime-backed groups attack the SDF

Despite the danger, Umm Muhammad goes out to work the fields from seven o’clock in the morning until 11. After returning home to complete household tasks, she goes back out once more from four o’clock in the afternoon until seven in the evening. 

Labor laws in AANES areas do not directly address workers like Muhammad, lawyer Hussein al-Owaid told Syria Direct. “The number of years they have worked are not recorded, and they do not receive health [benefits] or social security,” he added. “Their rights are squandered.”

If any farmworker—male or female—is injured or wronged, “they will not be able to claim their rights,” al-Owaid said. “They can turn to the [tribal] reconciliation committees, which have authority to settle disputes. If these committees cannot solve the problem, the injured party should turn to the public prosecutor.”

However, “there are no legal provisions specific to the category of farmworkers that the plaintiff could rely upon to claim their rights,” he added. 

Meanwhile, seeking compensation from a farmer or landowner is “virtually impossible,” the lawyer said. “The agreement is between the foreman and the workers, not between the landowner and them,” and the work is done “without a contract” to regulate the relationship between the two parties. 

Given the lack of laws establishing the rights of day laborers, protection is a thorny issue, the lawyer said. This “increases their suffering, making their present dark and their future clouded,” as he put it. 

While many women in rural Deir e-Zor need work, the AANES’ Social Affairs and Labor Commission has not launched any vocational training programs or economic projects targeting women in the area. Hanan al-Hammad, the co-president of the body in Deir e-Zor, attributed this to its “weak capacity.” 

With no laws to protect them as landowners refuse to raise wages, farmworkers like al-Ali have little hope of improving their economic situation. They fear the year to come will only bring “worse conditions and lower wages.”

This report was produced as part of Syria Direct’s Sawtna Training Program for women journalists across areas of control in Syria. It was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.