Poverty Alleviation in Drylands:

Located southeast of Aleppo, Syria, the Khanasser Valley is a semi-arid region characterized by impoverished natural resources and a fragile environment. These conditions have a severe impact on the survival and development of local communities. Historical and contemporary land use have led to significant resource degradation, primarily driven by water and wind erosion, as well as soil fertility depletion, thereby diminishing the area's production potential. 

Diverse landforms, topographic positions, and sub-catchment sizes characterized the valley's landscape. To effectively target technical options for improving agricultural productivity on Khanasser's degraded soils, a better understanding of water and nutrient dynamics across these landforms was essential. Consequently, ICARDA's Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) Team selected the area as a representative model site. This selection was based on its potential to demonstrate poverty alleviation in degraded drylands, to apply a systems approach under various management scenarios, and for use in extrapolative land-use planning. 

At that time, we hypothesized that modifying land use by applying “on-the-shelf” ICARDA technologies would alter the relationships between water harvesting and runoff, thereby impacting 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 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 were pulled out and filled into each clay-glazed pitcher jar buried in soil as supplemental irrigation. The Pitchers are clay-porous, allowing water to seep 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.