Explained: Chronology of the Dissolution of State Farms

State farms are lands owned by the state, which the state invests directly or leases to others for specific periods to cultivate agreed-upon crops. The state provided these farms with paid agricultural services at official rates, i.e., at subsidised prices, such as seeding, fertilising, harvesting and irrigation. The state also purchased their crops.

The concept of state farms is often confused with other state-owned and managed establishments such as poultry farms, dairies, fish farms, and model villages. All of these are situated on lands expropriated by the state according to the Agrarian Reform Law No. 161 of 1958. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to determine the extent of state farmlands and the number of workers employed there.

The Agrarian Reform Law No. 61 of 1958 established a public institution named the Agrarian Reform Institution (in 1976, the institution was dissolved and replaced by the Directorate of State Property and Agricultural Reform affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Reform) to implement the Agrarian Reform Law and the state property laws. Law No. 61 of 1958 allowed the institution to retain some of the expropriated lands without distributing them to farmers, to carry out projects or establish facilities for the public benefit.

There are no official Syrian figures on the extent of land expropriated by the state during the agrarian reform period, nor on what was redistributed to farmers or what land was used to establish state farms. Some circulated figures indicate that the state expropriated about 1.5 million hectares of agricultural land, with more than 75 percent not distributed to the farmers by the mid-1970s when distribution stopped.

The first mention of state farms occurred when the Regional Leadership of Syria’s ruling Baath Party formed a committee named “Reconstruction of State Farms” under Resolution No. 521 in 1974. One of the committee’s most notable actions was establishing state farms in the area known as the Arab Belt, adjacent to the Syrian-Turkish border in the predominantly Kurdish Hassakeh province, to cause demographic change in the region.

In 2000, the Baath Party’s Regional Leadership issued Resolution No. 83, which included the dissolution of state farms and their distribution to beneficiaries. The reason for dissolving the farms was not justified. However, some opposition members considered it one of the propaganda measures accompanying the power transfer from the late President Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar, suggesting a shift towards a more flexible and liberal policy. The dissolution of state farms meant transferring the ownership of their land to the identified beneficiaries, categorised into four groups:

1. The employees working on those farms.
2. Those who had land extorted before the state expropriated them and who became de facto tenants.
3. Residents of villages adjacent to the farms.
4. Farmers whose lands were submerged due to the construction of the Euphrates Dam.

However, a 2007 document (number 1682) from the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform indicated that the distribution of state farmlands had only been completed for some of the employees working on the farms. The document redefined the groups entitled to state farmlands, with a new order:

1. Farmers whose lands were submerged by Lake Assad and the Baath Dam built in 1991 on the Khabour River south of Hassakeh.
2. Those affected by the establishment of the Jabal AbdulAziz reserve in Hassakeh, which was declared by a decision of the Ministry of Agriculture No. 20 in 1993 and had its area modified several times (the last being by Ministry decision No. 27 in 2002, encompassing 50 villages with a population of 15,000).
3. Farmers with suspended transactions, i.e., those who had applied for agricultural lands under agrarian reform but were not granted any due to the cessation of distribution operations in the 1970s.

It is unclear whether the state farmlands have been distributed to their beneficiaries at any recent stage, what the theoretical mechanisms and criteria for distribution are, or how the distributed areas were estimated. In the town of Maskanah in the Aleppo countryside, which included the Tishreen farm, farmers, during their efforts to obtain agricultural regulation documents, are still treated as beneficiaries of the lands and beneficiaries of Baath Party Regional Command Resolution No. 83 of 2000 – not as owners of the holdings they invest in. Therefore, an agricultural regulation document was exceptionally granted to the farmers of Maskanah for the current season, based on a physical inventory conducted by a specialised committee, indicating the absence of ownership documents.

In 2023, Malak Maktabi, the head of the Directorate of State Property and Agricultural Reform affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Reform, told the official newspaper Al-Jamahir that the directorate would register the usufruct shares in the Land Registry in the name of the beneficiary listed in the distribution decision. However, this task appears to be extremely complicated, as according to Ms Maktabi, the directorate is still in the process of completing expropriation procedures and paying compensation to those whose lands were expropriated. This means that the expropriation processes in the 1960s and 1970s have not yet concluded.