Enhancing resilience and sustainability of agriculture

Agriculture in the Arab region faces major challenges, including water scarcity, land degradation, climate change and protracted conflicts, thus highlighting the need to enhance the sector’s resilience and sustainability by optimizing the use of water resources and access to agricultural innovations and technologies. 

ESCWA supports member States in enhancing agricultural resilience by generating knowledge material and technical tools on irrigation, water efficiency and agricultural green technologies. ESCWA also informs debates and proposes policy options for enhancing the agricultural sector’s resilience, and provides technical assistance to member States on developing agricultural strategies.

Our approach

Our partners

Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD), RICCAR, FAO/RNE, ESCWA Technology Centre 

Our activities

ESCWA has produced two training manuals on: utilizing supplementary irrigation for enhanced agricultural productivity, and on the use of geographic information system (GIS) tools to extract medium and long-term climate data projections.  

Six national training of trainers’ workshops on AquaCrop and GIS were organized in three project target countries: Jordan, Lebanon and the State of Palestine, benefiting  55 officials who prepared reports on specific case studies. Capacity needs assessments on agricultural technologies were completed for their ministries of agriculture. The collected information was included in a capacity needs assessment and solutions report.   

ESCWA has prepared knowledge materials on green technologies to increase the resilience of the agriculture sector, including five fact sheets on green technologies covering water harvesting, green fertilizers, solar dryers, small-scale food processing, and extending the shelf life of agricultural products through bio conservation. These five fact sheets will be integrated in the ESCWA Green Technology Compendium, being developed by the ESCWA Technology Centre, and will be used as a basis for training material.