'You have to survive' — drought, desperation and a 10-year-old handed to a border smuggler

"Shouldn't we take him to the hospital?"

Their 10-year-old son had a fever. But the husband could not bring himself to answer his wife. It was not that they lacked the money for a hospital visit. The problem was what came after.

The next planting season was almost upon them. They needed to buy seeds and fertilizer. They needed fuel to run the farm machinery.

It had started with a failed harvest. The household budget had grown tight. They had already cut back on meals. They could no longer spend on the child the way they once had.

A hospital visit would shrink the next season's operation even further. The rest was easy to predict: days when the family could not manage even one proper meal.

Just a few months earlier, they could not have imagined facing such a choice. Life had not been lavish, but farming had kept food on the table. Then, suddenly, everything fell apart.

Every autumn, they planted wheat and barley. Decades of experience had taught them when the rains would come and when to sow. Their parents had shown them; years of farming had done the rest.

But the rain did not come. Sowing too early meant the seeds would lie in dry soil and be lost — an expensive mistake. Waiting too long meant missing the planting window altogether.

They sowed late, and the harvest was meager. The costs of the season stayed the same; the income did not.

The real problem was what came next. There was no money for the following season — no money for seeds, no money for fuel. Above all, they were no longer sure they could feed their child.

In the end, the couple looked at the land. The fields that had fed their family for a lifetime. They decided to sell their last asset — and to send their child away.

The child had left for Europe not long before. It was an illegal border crossing, paid for through a smuggler. No one could know what might happen along the way. There was no guarantee of arriving safely.

Yet they had to send him. They judged that the risk was better than leaving him behind. Rebuilding their livelihood after selling the land and saying goodbye to their child was a problem for later.

After the child left, only the couple remained. One place at the table was empty. They had no way of knowing whether he had arrived safely. All they could do was hope he had crossed the border unharmed.

It was not so different from farming. Just as they had once waited in silence for rain that never came, the couple now waited quietly for word of their child.

The account above is a reconstructed narrative based on stories of Syrian farmers encountered by International Rescue Committee (IRC) field workers, as well as documented cases of underage irregular migration to Europe from northeastern Syria.

In Syria, repeated droughts and erratic rainfall have destroyed the livelihoods of many farmers, forcing them to cut spending on food and medical care. Some have been driven to sell their farmland and send family members on a dangerous journey to Europe.

Majid Abd al-Karim Muslit, a senior agriculture program manager at the IRC who oversees agricultural and livelihood support in Syria, said in an interview that the biggest changes Syrian farmers have faced in recent years are increasingly unpredictable rainfall and recurring droughts.

Majid, an agricultural engineer who has worked in agriculture and livelihood support for more than a decade, said that over the seven years he has spent observing rural Syria, things farmers once took for granted have been disappearing one by one.

One farmer told him, half-jokingly, that "all the news on social media is lies — even the weather forecast lies." The remark captured how difficult it has become to judge planting times based on past experience or weather reports alone.

"One of the most noticeable changes is in rainfall and precipitation patterns," Majid said. "The rainy season is starting later, dry spells are growing longer, and it has become very hard to predict exactly when rain will fall." He added that more frequent heat waves are also putting pressure on crops and water resources.

In the past, key winter crops such as wheat and barley were typically sown between October and mid-November. With rain arriving later more often in recent years, some farmers have pushed their planting back to December. Recurring droughts have also forced many areas to dig deeper wells than before to reach groundwater.

Some farmers, after enduring drought for several consecutive years, have been unable to afford to work their own land and have begun leasing it to others. The cost of farming inputs — seeds, fertilizer and fuel — has also risen sharply.

Farmers interviewed in the field tell the same story. Anwar (pseudonym), who has farmed in Syria for 42 years, said in a 2023 interview: "When there is plenty of rain, I make a profit; when there is no rain, I lose money. In 2019 the rain was good and the harvest was strong, but for the three or four years after that I kept losing money. The winter of 2021 felt like summer — the sun was blazing every single day."

More than three-quarters of Syria's cultivated land depends entirely on rainfall. When rain is late or insufficient, farmers absorb the losses directly, with no buffer.

A failed harvest immediately cuts into household spending on food and medical care, and puts the next planting season at risk. "I have seen farmers reduce the area they cultivate, or lease or sell their land, because they cannot cover the cost of seeds and fuel," Majid said.

For those who cannot hold on even that long, the only option is to leave. Some sell their farmland — their last asset — to send family members far away. In some cases, the land is sold to pay smugglers for an illegal crossing into Europe: a journey that is both dangerous and costly.

"Climate change is not simply an agricultural problem," Majid said. "It directly threatens the stability and quality of life of rural families."

The stories Majid shared are not isolated cases. Zooming out to Syria as a whole, the scale of the crisis comes into sharper focus.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Syria suffered its worst drought in decades last year. Rainfall from November 2024 through May last year was more than 50 percent below the long-term average. As a result, Syria's grain output last year fell more than 60 percent below the recent average.

The deeper problem is how little capacity Syria has to absorb climate shocks.

More than a decade of conflict has severely damaged infrastructure across the country. The World Bank estimated that direct physical damage to infrastructure and residential and non-residential buildings in Syria between 2011 and 2024 totaled about $108 billion. Rebuilding would cost an estimated $216 billion — roughly 10 times Syria's estimated GDP in 2024.

The food crisis is already a reality. According to the World Food Programme, about 7.2 million people in Syria are currently experiencing acute food insecurity, of whom 1.6 million are at severe levels. A large share of households are getting by on reduced meals or skipping them altogether.

The same drought, in other words, is not the same disaster for everyone. For people already weakened by conflict and poverty, a climate shock can be enough to destroy an entire livelihood.

"Farmers are dealing with drought, unpredictable rainfall and rising temperatures, while at the same time contending with damaged agricultural infrastructure, landmine contamination, rising prices, limited access to water and irrigation, high costs for fuel, seeds and fertilizer, and shortages and quality problems with seeds and other farming inputs," Majid said.

There is another paradox at the heart of what Syrian farmers are living through. The countries bearing the heaviest burden of the climate crisis today are not the ones most responsible for creating it.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, developed countries accounted for 57 percent of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use and industry between 1850 and 2019. The least developed countries' share was limited to 0.4 percent.

Countries that industrialized first burned fossil fuels to grow their economies and, in doing so, also built the social infrastructure needed to cushion the blow of disasters. But greenhouse gases do not stop at borders, and the damage they cause is not shared equally.

In a 2024 IRC analysis, 17 countries simultaneously facing severe climate change and conflict impacts were home to 10.5 percent of the world's population. Those countries account for just 3.5 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. Syria is among them.

Yet 71 percent of all people worldwide in need of humanitarian assistance, and about one-third of those affected by natural disasters, are concentrated in those same 17 countries. The places that generated prosperity and the places paying the price first are not the same.

And the money needed to reduce that harm is not reaching the most vulnerable places in sufficient amounts. According to an IRC analysis published last year, the 17 climate- and conflict-vulnerable countries received just 12 percent of the climate adaptation funding allocated to developing nations in 2022.

South Korea is not outside this structure. According to the OECD, South Korea's per capita carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion stood at 10.6 tonnes in 2022, above the OECD average of 7.8 tonnes.

No direct line can be drawn between carbon emitted in South Korea and the drought endured by a particular Syrian farming family. But South Korea has benefited from the same fossil fuel-driven industrialization and economic growth, and it is not outside the global emissions structure that has produced today's climate change.

What do Syrian farmers actually need? Majid said that providing food or seeds to carry farmers through a single drought is not enough to address the problems they face.

"One of the most frustrating things is seeing farmers who want to keep farming but simply cannot afford to," he said.

The duration of support is also a problem. "Many projects focus on a single growing season, but the challenges farmers face are long-term," he said. "Farmers who have endured drought for multiple years need more than just seeds."

The IRC's Seed Security program in Syria is one attempt to address these challenges.

The program goes beyond simply handing out seeds. Farmers test and grow a range of varieties suited to local conditions, then share a portion of what they produce with other farmers — spreading access to quality seeds within the community.

The IRC supports farmers in running variety trials on their own fields and provides training and crop monitoring throughout the growing season.

Majid said this kind of support needs to be sustained and expanded over the long term. "The hardest thing is facing the reality that farmers who need solutions the most cannot access them because of cost — even when we know good solutions exist," he said. "More investment is needed across the entire agricultural system: seed systems, water management, research and reliable climate information."

From South Korea, "rain not arriving on time" may sound like a single weather event. For a Syrian farmer, it is anything but. It can mean cutting food and medical spending, abandoning the next planting season, and ultimately selling the land and saying goodbye to family.

"What people in countries far from Syria — including South Korea — need to understand is that climate change is not just one more problem for Syrian farmers," Majid said. "It adds yet another burden on top of an already extremely difficult situation. Even when farmers do everything they can, if the rain does not come as expected, they can still lose their crops. That is the reality."