Poverty Alleviation in Drylands:

Khanasser Vallley, SE Aleppo city in Syria, is in a semi-dry land area with poor natural resources and environmental poverty, which impacts local societies' survival and development. Past and current land use conditions in the area resulted in resource degradation, primarily via water and wind erosion and soil fertility depletion, reducing production potential. 

This Valley landscape varied with landforms, topo-sequence positions, and sub-catchment sizes. An improved understanding of water and nutrient dynamics as a function of landforms was required to target technical options for maximum impact on agricultural productivity in Khanasser degraded soils. Therefore, ICARDA's Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) Team selected it as a representative model site for the poverty alleviation potential in degraded drylands, as a system approach under various management scenarios, and for extrapolative land use planning. 

At that time, we hypothesized that modified land use by applying “on-the-shelf” ICARDA technologies would change the relationships between water harvesting and runoff and thus impact soil erosion and groundwater storage.

Increasing the livelihood income of local communities, particularly the poor, presented serious challenges to SWC planners. Therefore, we were thinking about supporting options and technologies for developing environmentally friendly “adaptable and adoptable” agricultural technologies and approaches. Such integrated and transferable approaches are useful tools to analyze natural resource degradation and evaluate potential resource management options applicable in drylands beyond Khanasser for further adoption in the CWANA area.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, a blend of indigenous traditional management practices was initiated in the dry areas. A system of pitcher irrigation technique combined with a cistern technology served to economically water dozens of olive trees planted on the degraded slopes in Serdah village in Khansser Valley. In the area, where most farmers in the valley had previously abandoned the worst land and suffered from extreme poverty under very harsh, warm, and dry, long summers and very cool winters. 

The cistern collected and stored enough runoff water from a large catchment area with a storage capacity of 12.5 m3. Around 7 liters of water/per month was pulled out and filled into each Pitcher Clay glazed jar buried in soil as supplemental irrigation. The Pitchers are clay-porous, and water seeps out slowly into the soil.

In soil, the Pitcher's water release process through the walls of the jars was enough to feed a young olive tree planted in a small water harvesting bund.