Applied research into soil conservation and land management is needed urgently here; in fact, right across the WANA region. The problem is that soil is a subject that tends to make the farmers' eyes glaze over. It is not because they don't care. It is because they are short of time and short of money and must look to the next harvest, not to the state of the soil in five, 10, or 15 years.
        But it is also true that they watch the soil washing down the hillside all of their lives, as did their parents before them, and they're still there and farming. Is it, they may ask, really that urgent?
        Yes. What happens to the soil has an immediate effect on income. Exhaustion of nutrients will show up in falling
yields, and excessive erosion will make the ground uncultivable. And silting of rivers and irrigation canals will limit the water supply.
        The old answer to what is perceived as farmer apathy has been to devise soil conservation measures and enforce them. That does not work. A prime example, albeit in a very different country, was in Ethiopia, where slopes were terraced through a food-for-work program after the great famine of the 1980s. Farmers worked hard on this because they were obliged to, but also because the food that was supplied made it economically worthwhile. Yet the terraces reduced effective land area, and thus yield; moreover they were too narrow to turn a plow. So after the changes of 1991, when the area became Eritrea, farmers, still under economic pressure, actually dismantled the conservation measures themselves. Had the measures been devised in consultation with farmers, they might have survived.
        But how do you get busy cash-strapped farmers to cooperate?  This is the challenge facing ICARDA's Farm Resources Management Program (FRMP). We decided to tackle it by starting with what the farmers perceived as the immediate problems--and demonstrate the relevance to these of soil conservation. This calls for a cautious, courteous approach. Building such an alliance with land users cannot be done in a week. It is our job to convince them. And it was this need which brought us here--to the hilltop village of Yakhour, a few kilometers from the northern frontier of Syria.
        We found that the problems perceived by the farmers included falling yields due to loss of soil off slopes, biennal drops in yield, pests and frost damage. If we could help farmers solve these, within the context of soil conservation, we could get them to work with us in the longer term. But one has to be careful, still; if we imply that they don't know how to grow olives, the response will be at best amused. They have, after all, been doing it for generations.
        An indirect approach was needed. So we decided to invite a group of the farmers from Yakhour to meet and swap notes with olive growers further south, in Idleb province, where we hoped that what they saw would start them thinking about their problems. We would play a proactive role only in organizing the visit. When we got there, we would shut up and let the farmers talk to each other in peace. But we would be there to underpin the technical aspect of any discussions, as would a team from the Idleb Olive Bureau of Syria's own Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform.
        The meeting took place in the middle of March 1997.  At Idleb, a team from the Idleb Olive Bureau, headed by Mr Zakaria Kawas, joined in. A group of specialists from Aleppo's Directorate of Agriculture joined us later. The first stop was at one of the large olive fields in Idleb where the Idlebi farmers received the group. We introduced the two groups  to each other  and invited farmers to talk about their operations and exchange ideas.

he olive groves sweep across the hills of Northern Syria in long, straight lines of trees, like soldiers on parade. In the mild, bright early-December morning, the earth between the trees is a light gray-brown; here and there in the valley bottoms, patches of deep brown earth or light green mark the arable land. In the distance, to the north, the snowcapped mountains of Anatolia fade away into the haze; closer at hand, villages perch precariously on the summits of hills, houses jammed together, looking for all the world as if they were about to tumble down the hillside. The delicate light from the low early sun picks out every detail in the landscape. The scene reminds the onlooker of Tuscany--an impression reinforced by the Italian makers' names stamped on the heavy, old-fashioned olive presses that stand in the villages.

        An attractive view. But to the farming systems researcher, this landscape can be read like a book. The villages are where they are because the hilltops are the poorest land; the deeper swatches of green in the valleys are there because the valley bottoms have been nourished for centuries by the soil that is washed off the higher ground in the heavy winter rains. It is still happening. And for the farmers whose income depends on the olive groves that lie between the two, that is not good news.