Ahmad Sadiddin

Policy Impact on Farm Income and Water Use in the North-east of Syria: the Impact of Syrian Agricultural Policy on Water Use and the Stability of Farm Income in the North-east of the Country Ahmad Sadiddin

The book is trying to answer one of the most hot questions related to the development of Syrian agriculture: how to sustain high agricultural productivity to provide acceptable level of incomes to farmers and at the same time preserve the most scarce natural resource of the Country, namely water. The research is based on quantitative analysis of data collected at the field level and from secondary sources. Due to time and financial constraints, the research was confined to the north-eastern region of the Country where the problem of water shortages is mostly observed. The region farms are classified in small number of representative farms and then a mathematical programming model was built for each. The models allowed tracing the demand function for water by each representative farm. By takig the weighted sum of the individual functions, we get demand function for water at the regional level, which allow us to trace the impact of many policy scenarios on cropping mixes and water use consequently. Then correspondent changes in farm gross margins and so-called certainty equivalents are used to shed light on the impacts of these scenarios on incomes and their stability.