Watching ANOTHER Humanitarian Crisis Take Seed

With 125,000 dead and more than 2.2 million Syrians already displaced to other lands, there are 4.25 million people internally displaced in Syria. There is, for the 20 million still trying to survive in Syria, food for 14 million. Did you ever wonder how business was conducted during a civil war? Or how food was grown? Did you wonder how the neighboring nations could absorb so many of these refugees — with 3 million Syrians, per one source, now in neighboring countries — from a nation where most had lived a middle class existence. It is estimated by David Wright Miliband that fifty percent of the population was now either internally or externally displaced.

Here is the timeline of the implosion of hunger and the growing humanitarian crisis, as ninety percent of the schools remain closed as well as more than one-third of the hospitals, with a new outbreak of polio as first the historic land of Syris is destroyed, and then its people — as world leaders play their own cruel form of tug of war, as inequality threatens stability. The UN now estimates that out of a total population of 20.8 million, 4.25 million people are internally displaced — many driven from place to place as the front lines move. All of Syria’s 14 governorates are affected, though the situation is particularly precarious in Aleppo, Ar-Raqqa, Homs, Rural Damascus, Hama, Idleb and Dera’a; 6.8 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance, per the estimate from the United Nations. In most of areas, basic commodities such as fuel, gas, warm clothes, water and food have become unaffordable as both displaced and local populations virtually are deprived of income sources at a time when their savings and their coping mechanisms are slowly getting exhausted. And what none of the news stories tell the reader is that what uprooted lives — not dissimilar to what was the catalyst to the Arab Spring in Tunisia — was the drought in the north of Syria in the harvest of 2008. This bit of information is significant as new famine sets in in 2014 in the same region of Syria. As the world just sits and watches.

Nov 1, 2003 – Agriculture today remains a pillar of economy, in Syria.

Jan 26, 2009 – During 2008/09, Syria moved from a net exporter to a net importer of wheat due ….. While the General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade (Hoboob) bought 970,000 tons from the 2008/09 crop….

May 9, 2012 – “Syrian grain imports are being transacted in large volumes using offices in Lebanon to handle the paperwork and act as initial buyer,” one trader said. … “Major wheat supplies to Syria seem to be arriving under state-to-state .

Jul 25, 2013 – AMMAN (Reuters) – Civil war in Syria has cut the wheat harvest to its … wheat trade that subsidized their production, to look for other buyers.

Aug 22, 2013 – “Syria’s efforts to step up food purchases are being thwarted by sellers unwilling to risk delays in payments from frozen foreign bank accounts. Civil war and a deepening humanitarian crisis have prompted the government of President Bashar al-Assad to issue a series of tenders for sugar, wheat, flour and rice in recent weeks. The country needs to import around 2 million tonnes of wheat this year as civil war has sliced its crop to a near-30 year low at 1.5 million tonnes, less than half the pre-conflict average.” -per a opyright tory by Thomson Reuters 2013.

Sep 2, 2013 – Syria has cancelled a tender to buy tonnes of white sugar, its second … The state grain agency on August 20 cancelled a tender for 200 000… Syria cancelled an urgent tender to buy sugar on Monday, two weeks after cancelling a bid to buy wheat, the latest signs that President Bashar al-Assad’s government is losing its ability to buy food as civil war destroys its harvests. In the failed transactions, Syria offered to pay for the food with funds held in frozen bank accounts abroad.

Sep 2, 2013 – Abu Dhabi/Beirut: Syria cancelled an urgent tender to buy sugar on … the General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade (Hoboob), the state wheat buyer, cancelled a tender for 200,000 tonnes of soft milling wheat on 20 August. At the time it said it had received two offers but they did not meet specifications. Syria’s civil war, now in its third year, has killed more than 100,000 people and driven millions from their homes. “We are in no urgent need to tender because we have a good strategic stock, we have always maintained a 12-month stockpile,” said the official, who declined to be identified. He said Hoboob had purchased 820,000 tonnes of wheat from the domestic harvest in the current procurement season and still holds its normal pre-war reserve of 3 million tonnes.

Sep 12, 2013 – In its worst harvest in decades, as civil war rages, means more … “The government is in extreme denial about its food stocks,” said one trader based in the … the General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade (Hoboob), the state wheat buyer…

Sep 13, 2013 – The General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade (Hoboob), the state wheat buyer, insists it has 3 million tons of wheat in store… Syria’s worst harvest in decades, as civil war rages, means more pressure to import on a government whose currency reserves are dwindling — even if support from Assad’s sponsor Iran, and a shrinking population to support as Syrians flee the country and provinces fall to rebel control, ease the burden and buy time. How Syria’s stocks of grain stand is impossible to say with confidence. State grain buying agency, the General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade, insists it has 3 million tons of wheat in store, equivalent to a year’s supply for the entire 22 million population.

Oct 11, 2013 – (Reuters) – Deliveries of wheat are starting to reach Syria’s ports as its bank accounts abroad are gradually being freed from sanctions, with grain traders detecting a greater willingness from European governments to allow deals to go ahead on humanitarian grounds. As civil war grinds on, Syria is facing its worst wheat harvest in three decades. President Bashar al-Assad, who has already escaped air strikes as punishment for chemical weapons attacks, will now be able to bolster depleted food supplies. Trade sources familiar with commercial deals said at least 500,000 tonnes of bread-making wheat that Syria had tried to obtain months ago, but which could not be paid for because its foreign bank accounts were frozen, were now starting to be delivered. “What we are seeing at the moment is Syrian government business that was done in the past — between four to six months ago — that is only now being executed,” a Middle East based trade source involved in deals said. “It looks like the payment issues are being resolved.” A source with Syria’s state wheat buyer, the General Establishment for Cereal Processing and Trade, (Hoboob), confirmed deals were struck months ago for 500,000 tonnes of wheat, adding that 150,000 tonnes had recently been delivered using previously frozen funds. “The willingness amongst governments that have frozen Syrian assets to offer waivers allowing the regime to tap into these funds in order to buy food staples is likely to increase in the short term,” said Torbjorn Soltvedt of risk consultancy Maplecroft.”

POST SCRIPT: Arrested in February 2019, Anwar Raslan allegedly led an investigative unit with its own prison, known as Branch 251, near Damascus, Syria. Raslan has been has been charged with 59 counts of murder. During interrogations between April 2011 and 2012, with guards using bars, cables and whips to beat prisoners during interviews, prosecutors claim at least 4,000 people were tortured by Raslan’s subordinates, some subjected to electric shocks. Others, according to a statement by a German prosecutor, were “hung from the ceiling by their wrists, with only their toes touching the ground.” Besides the many who died, there were the rapes and aggravated sexual assaults.

Eyad al-Gharib is charged with a role in the abduction and torture in the autumn of 2011 of at least 30 people; arresting protesters and delivering them to the Branch 251 jail, he reported to Raslan. Trials are set for 2020. 

 And last year, Syria had planned to import around 1.5 million tons of mostly Russian wheat, with expected local wheat procurement at around half a million tons, down from what used to be self-sufficiency  producing 4 million tons of wheat in a good year, able to export 1.5 million tons, according to the Syrian internal trade minister.  And this all WAS a man-made disaster leading to ceding the sovereignty of the Land to Turkey and Russia.  

 

 

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In a series of stories for The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, the columnist from The Guardian, reported on the National Security Agency’s vast international and domestic surveillance programs, based on thousands of classified documents embezzled by Edward Snowden, for no personal gain, from the NSA’s internal computer systems. which, finally, has resulted this week in judges giving oversight again to the U S Constitution again.

Greenwald this week said with respect to the British newspaper — rather than any media at the time in the United States — raising the conflict of privacy over security: ” I am very proud of the journalism we have done. We published only a small fraction of the ones that we have been given so far because we have gone through each of them and made sure that nothing we are publishing endangers human lives. What we have done is created a debate inside the United States and around the world, one that crosses ideological and partisan lines, about the dangers of the surveillance state.”

So many Americans are caught up in the trees, maintaining the status quo with their own cellphones and their own valued private lives, that they cannot see the forest. And wasn’t that the story of what had gone wrong in Syria and their police state?

How could so many elected officials ignore for so long the first ten amendments of the constitution of the United States? Wasn’t this the same problem from the first eight years of the New Millennium, directed at the time at the Securities and Exchange Commission, when the regulators quit regulating — and next the judges who quit judging in open court.