Monitoring Agricultural Drought in the Near East - Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought: A Global Study - page 218

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that communicate early warnings or impacts of seasonal droughts based
on the interpretation of the available raw data. A major problem is that
the interinstitutional partnerships required to produce specialized drought
information bulletins are hampered by the common practice of meteoro-
logical services of a region charging a fee for meteorological data, even to
other government departments. With some exceptions (e.g., Turkey), the
charges are often prohibitive and make no economic sense. As a result, the
meteorological databases, which are indispensable for basic analyses such
as drought risk assessment cannot be accessed by the agricultural user and
research community, which has the highest data requirements but the low-
est financial resources of all potential users of meteorological data.

Fr om Crisis Control to Drought Management
In most countries of the region, governments have come to realize the short-
comings of their current responses to drought and have begun developing
institutional arrangements for a shift from a crisis management approach
to long-term drought management. The government of Morocco has re-
cently established a National Drought Observatory (NDO), with the goal
of collecting, analyzing, and delivering drought-related information in a
timely manner (Ameziane, 2001). As part of its mandate, the NDO has
to characterize drought, conduct vulnerability assessments, establish crite-
ria for declaring drought and triggering mitigation and response activities,
and establish procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of drought pro-
grams. The NDO is thus clearly a technical coordinating unit at the apex
of a virtual structure composed of technical experts from different govern-
ment administrations, dealing with different aspects of drought manage-
ment through technical committees and working groups.
Syria has requested assistance from the Food and Agriculture Organiza-
tion of the United Nations (FAO) to develop a national drought policy and
strategy. The goal of the policy is to reduce vulnerability to drought, mini-
mize drought impact, and facilitate postdrought recovery (Sweet, 2001).
The FAO assistance will also help Syria specify how the policy will be
implemented and translated into drought management plans for different
ecological zones and livelihood systems.
In Tunisia the Ministry of Agriculture has developed detailed guidelines
for drought management. The guidelines list a range of drought mitigation
activities, which are specified according to drought stage (drought plan-
ning, management, and post-drought recovery), drought scenario (dry au-
tumn, dry winter, dry spring, and dry year), and economic sector (Louati
et al., 1999).
Regardless of the diversity of approaches, the governments of the Near
East countries will need to consider the general experience gained else-
where, which is that the institutional arrangements may determine the ef-
fectiveness of any drought monitoring system. The first requirement is to
establish a multidisciplinary central drought management unit (CDMU),

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