An FAO Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission (CFSAM) visited all main food producing areas in Timor-Leste from 27 April to 9 May 2021 to estimate the 2021 crop production and the import requirements during the 2021/22 marketing year (April/March). The Mission’s aim was to provide an accurate picture of severity and extent of the shocks that affected the agriculture sector in 2021 and identify the country’s main agricultural support needs until the next harvest. In particular, as officially requested by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF), the CFSAM assessed the impact of the tropical storm and floods as well as FAW and ASF outbreaks on the agriculture sector.

Five years into the ongoing and tragic conflict, the paper analyzes how Syria’s economy and its people have been affected and outlines the challenges in rebuilding the economy. With extreme limitations on information, the findings of the paper are subject to an extraordinary degree of uncertainty. The key messages are: (1) that the devastating civil war has set the country back decades in terms of economic, social and human development. Syria’s GDP today is less than half of what it was before the war started and it could take two decades or more for Syria to return to its pre-conflict GDP levels; and that (2) while reconstructing damaged physical infrastructure will be a monumental task, rebuilding Syria’s human and social capital will be an even greater and lasting challenge.