The Future of the Syrian Agricultural Economy in the Reconstruction Phase: Foresight Scenarios for Food Security and Sustainable Development

Agriculture is one of the key pillars of the Syrian economy because of its role in food provision, employment, rural livelihoods, and economic and trade activity. However, years of crisis, damage to agricultural infrastructure and irrigation, storage and transport networks, rising input costs, declining investment and finance, and growing pressure on water resources have weakened the sector's productive capacity and food-security contribution. This study evaluates the Syrian agricultural economy and explores alternative recovery pathways during reconstruction, focusing on water-use efficiency, agricultural value chains, and technological and institutional transformation. The research adopts a descriptive-analytical approach supported by a Cobb-Douglas production function for 2000-2024, a simplified Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, regional comparative analysis of irrigation efficiency, and three future scenarios for 2025-2030. The econometric results indicate a high goodness of fit (R² = 0.89), with positive and statistically significant elasticities for labor, capital, water, and land; the sum of elasticities equals one, indicating constant returns to scale within the model specification.

The findings further suggest that shifting toward more efficient irrigation can reduce water use and improve water productivity, while combining agricultural investment with higher water-use efficiency produces stronger effects on agricultural value added, rural real income, and food prices than either intervention alone. Scenario analysis shows that the integrated sustainable agriculture pathway generates the strongest outcomes under the study assumptions by increasing crop production, narrowing the food gap, and strengthening agriculture's contribution to GDP. The study concludes that agricultural reconstruction should move beyond restoring pre-crisis production levels toward a more resource-efficient, resilient, and sustainable agricultural model capable of supporting food security and long-term development.