An agricultural worker in Northwest Syria

Dr Mirela Barbu (Business School) tells us about her research in Northwest Syria, including working with agricultural experts to produce podcasts for farmers amid the Syrian Civil War.

How did you start working in Syria?

There was an element of chance to it, because I was collaborating with the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara). They offer research opportunities to academics in countries in war, especially in post-conflict areas. They had a big Syrian Programme, and in 2020 I was contacted by Cara to supervise three research projects on agricultural value chains.

This felt like a huge door opening for me. While supervising these projects I read a lot about Syria and became passionate about it. It became clear to me that we needed to invent something to help Syrian farmers receive assistance and support.

Could you explain the context of agriculture in Syria?

Before the Civil War, Syria was a planned economy. Its model was very similar to the Soviet model. That meant farmers received a lot of support from the state, including advice about cultivation. So farmers were accustomed to this level of support and strong role of institutions. This disappeared during the war, though, and there was a huge need for these services to be continued.

Because of the difficult conditions created by the war, it wasn’t easy for us to visit and get to know the farmers. So we thought, what can we do? This is how we came up with the idea for a podcast, as a substitution for being there in person. We called the podcast Agricultural Voices Syria. This was in 2021, and it was funded jointly by SSRP and the International Development Challenge Fund (IDCF).

What region of Syria are you working in?

We’re working in Northwest Syria, which is a non-regime area under Turkish protection. The Turkish government and army have control of this area and it is hard to access. Only NGOs and other humanitarian organizations can operate there. This made the project more complicated, because we have never visited the area. For any fieldwork activity we have to rely on our Syrian partners.

Why did you feel podcasts were the best medium to use?

Well, you need an infrastructure. It is not so easy to broadcast messages on radio and television in Syria, but smartphone coverage is very good, which means people can access the podcast episodes through an app. The episodes are also on YouTube, and in the second year of the project we created videos.

Interdisciplinary collaboration has been key for our success. I looked for an academic at Sussex who has expertise in podcasting, and this is how I met Prof Martin Spinelli, my research partner. He’s the only professor of podcasting in the UK. We’ve been working together on different projects for four years now.

How did the podcasts come together, and how did you source the agricultural information?

We worked with a Syrian NGO called Syrian Academic Expertise. This is a group of Syrian academics and experts from different fields including education and agriculture. There is a big problem of deskilling during a war. People lose their jobs, particularly intellectual jobs in academia. They can’t find this type of job anymore, but they wanted to maintain and use their expertise and experience. So they were the ideal group for us to collaborate with to produce these podcasts.

We finally met the Syrian Academic Expertise team in Gaziantep (Turkey) in 2022, almost two years after the start of our collaboration. That was a great moment because all activities up to then had been over Zoom. We held a workshop to gather their opinion on what should be done to promote sustainable agricultural practices in the future.

What kind of guidance do the podcasts provide for farmers?

The podcasts provide advice about how to grow certain plants, what type of fertilizers to use, what chemicals to avoid, what to do with agricultural waste, how to recycle and create by-products. They also include guidance on certain key commodities in Northwest Syria, such as wheat, olive oil and vegetables. 

How did the farmers respond to the podcasts?

In 2021 we ran a survey asking the farmers how they use podcasts, and what they expected from us. It came out that farmers loved the podcast, but they felt, for a certain type of advice, it would be good to have some visual material.

We applied for a small SSRP grant to create 15 videos in 2022. Some of them were great successes – we had over 15,000 views for videos on certain commodities. This told us that there was a need for this kind of information.

Also we won an interdisciplinary research award by Emerald Publishing in 2021, and the Sussex Impact Award in 2022. This gave us visibility. More people became interested in our work. We can gauge the success of the podcasts through views, listens, and also surveys with the farmers. We have also collected qualitative data through interviews.

Have you been involved in other projects in Northwest Syria?

Yes. I worked on a project with Prof Fiona Marshall from SPRU, which was supported by the University of Sussex Business School. We wanted to help buffalo herders maintain this activity because it is a rapidly declining trade. There are only about 15 buffalo breeders left in Syria. There were huge buffalo herds in Syria before the war. Lack of environmental land management and climate change have also had a role in their decreased numbers. Because of drought, the ponds have gradually disappeared. So the project was about preserving and protecting the livelihoods of these breeders in increasingly difficult conditions.

What have you been working on more recently?

This year I applied for funding from the IDCF, and got it. With the grant money we are implementing different activities. Syrian Academic Expertise has established an agricultural development centre in Azaz, Northwest Syria, not far from Gaziantep. This centre will give them, for the first time, an infrastructure where they can experiment different agricultural techniques and growing methods. At the centre there is a greenhouse with drip irrigation and a hydroponic system.

We are planning to record podcasts and videos at the centre, again to support farmers, and also to host educational visits. Growing seedlings which can be used for various purposes including reforestation is another key activity. The centre will survive this project, it will be an important resource for many years to come. We are also planning to produce a podcast series on Syrian food heritage involving women, which aims to bring women’s voices at the forefront. We focus on food as heritage for resistance and resilience to conflict in this series.

This year I was awarded an SSRP impact grant for a project with my colleague Prof Natalia Slutskaya. We organised a workshop in Gaziantep with members of the Ministry of Agriculture to understand the importance of sustainability for future agricultural development and the challenges of implementing sustainability in a post-conflict zone.

We hope to develop more collaborations from here. We started addressing farmers’ needs, and now we’re interacting with other actors including NGOs and institutions. We’re passionate about this work and want to keep going.

Read more about Dr Barbu's research here. 

This research supports the fulfilment of the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

SDG 2 - Zero Hunger

ZDG 12 - Responsible Production and Consumption