Water Scarcity and Political Barriers Squeeze Palestinian Farmers, Study Finds

Farming in Palestine has never been simply a matter of soil and weather, but a new study published in the journal Environmental Challenges provides some of the most detailed farm-level evidence yet of just how tightly ecology, infrastructure, and politics are intertwined there. Researchers Amjad Mizyed and Maher Abu-Madi of Birzeit University surveyed 250 farmers across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and interviewed 17 experts to build a systematic picture of the pressures shaping agricultural sustainability in one of the world’s most constrained environments. Their central finding is stark: ecological stress in Palestinian agriculture is not a set of isolated environmental problems but an interconnected system in which water scarcity, land fragmentation, infrastructure damage, governance failures, and unequal access to resources reinforce one another, pushing many farmers toward survival strategies that erode long-term resilience.

The study arrives at a moment of extraordinary pressure. Data were collected between March and April 2026, during the ongoing war, when Gaza’s agricultural system was already reeling from extensive damage to farmland, greenhouses, irrigation networks, and water infrastructure. Recent remote-sensing research cited by the authors has documented widespread war-induced destruction of agricultural land in Gaza, while the West Bank continues to face territorial fragmentation, settlement expansion, and restricted access to land and water. Against this backdrop, the researchers set out to answer three questions: which ecological and governance constraints most affect farming, how those constraints translate into production and livelihood outcomes, and whether farmers’ adaptation responses build resilience or merely signal distress.

Methodologically, the team combined a structured farmer survey with semi-structured expert interviews and secondary documentary evidence, including official statistics from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, GIS-based reports, and peer-reviewed literature. The survey covered four regional strata—Gaza, and the northern, central, and southern West Bank—and reached farmers across different farm sizes, with open-field vegetables and field crops making up 66.8 percent of the sample. More than half of respondents relied on drip or modern irrigation, and 60 percent had more than a decade of farming experience. Because conventional random sampling was infeasible under conditions of displacement, access restrictions, and insecurity, the researchers used purposive and snowball sampling, and they are careful to describe the sample as analytically informative rather than statistically representative.

To quantify ecological pressure, the team constructed an Ecological Constraint Severity Index, a formative composite measure built from 23 constraint items rated on a five-point scale, spanning water, climate, soil and inputs, and regulatory-political domains. The overall index reached a mean of 4.08, indicating high perceived severity across the sample. The Water Constraint Index scored highest at 4.34, followed by the Regulatory-Political Constraint Index at 4.12, the Soil and Input Constraint Index at 3.87, and the Climate Stress Index at 3.73. At the item level, the most severe pressures were shortages of irrigation water, the rising cost of obtaining water, import restrictions on agricultural inputs and technologies, war-related damage to infrastructure, restricted access to water sources, and water salinity. A sensitivity analysis using alternative weighting produced nearly identical results, suggesting the findings are robust to how the index is aggregated.

Regional contrasts were pronounced. Gaza recorded the highest overall severity, with a mean score of 4.38, followed by the southern West Bank at 4.01, the northern West Bank at 3.88, and the central West Bank at 3.74. A Kruskal–Wallis test confirmed statistically significant regional differences, and post-hoc comparisons showed Gaza significantly exceeded all three West Bank regions. Gaza farmers reported acute problems with water salinity, infrastructure damage, energy interruptions, and shrinking cultivated areas, while West Bank farmers emphasized water scarcity, access restrictions, and land fragmentation. The authors caution that these regional differences reflect contextual differences rather than causal estimates, since Gaza and the West Bank differ simultaneously in ecological exposure, conflict intensity, infrastructure, and institutions.

The downstream consequences were severe and measurable. Overall, 72.4 percent of farmers reported declining agricultural production over the previous three years, and 58.8 percent reported declining product quality, which they linked to salinity, irregular irrigation, heat stress, and deteriorating soils. Nearly two-thirds reported falling agricultural incomes, while 73.2 percent said total production costs had risen by 26 percent or more, driven by water, energy, fertilizers, transport, and infrastructure repairs. Most strikingly, 61.2 percent reported that ecological constraints had undermined their household’s ability to secure sufficient or diverse food. In a binary logistic regression, higher constraint severity more than doubled the odds of household food-security impact, Gaza residence raised those odds by a factor of 2.66, and greater difficulty accessing services increased them by 45 percent, while higher adoption of adaptation practices modestly reduced the odds.

Yet the study also shows that Palestinian farmers are far from passive. The Adaptation Practice Index reached a moderate mean of 3.18, and the most commonly adopted measures were drip irrigation, reducing cultivated area, changing crop composition, and soil management. The researchers classified these responses functionally: practices such as drip irrigation, rainwater harvesting, drought-resistant varieties, and soil management count as resilience-building because they maintain productive capacity and resource efficiency, while reducing cultivated area is classified as distress coping because it contracts the productive base without strengthening adaptive capacity. Crop-composition change was treated as context-dependent, depending on whether it reflects a planned shift toward stress-tolerant crops or a forced narrowing of options. Notably, several high-potential practices—solar pumping, rainwater harvesting, and water reuse—were perceived as effective by those who used them but remained little adopted, blocked by cost, infrastructure requirements, and lack of institutional support.

That gap points to the study’s environmental justice core. Some 57.6 percent of farmers perceived unequal access to water, support, or extension services, with inequalities tied to farm size, financial capacity, geographic location, and institutional connections. Service-access data reinforce the point: 68.8 percent reported that finance and loans were unavailable or available only with difficulty, and similar majorities struggled to obtain modern technologies, irrigation services, marketing support, and extension advice. The authors argue that political and governance constraints should be understood not as background conditions but as structural ecological constraints that determine who can access land and water, who can adopt effective adaptations, and who is pushed into distress coping or eventual exit from farming. Indeed, 38 percent of respondents said they would continue farming with reduced land or less diversification if constraints persist, and 14.4 percent said they might stop farming entirely.

Expert interviews echoed and explained these patterns, highlighting aquifer stress and salinity, territorial fragmentation, weak inter-institutional coordination, inadequate compensation after disasters, and uneven adaptive capacity as the mechanisms behind the survey’s numbers. The authors’ policy prescriptions are correspondingly integrated: water security as the central entry point, combining irrigation rehabilitation, decentralized storage, salinity management, safe water reuse, and affordable renewable energy for pumping; clear policy distinction between resilience-building adaptation and distress coping; redesigned support systems with risk-sensitive credit, stronger extension, and transparent compensation; equity criteria embedded in programme targeting so that the most exposed and least-resourced farmers are prioritized; and spatially differentiated strategies for Gaza’s recovery needs versus the West Bank’s land-protection and planning challenges. The study has limitations—purposive sampling, self-reported perceptions, and a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inference—but its message is unambiguous. Sustainable agriculture in Palestine is not only a resource-efficiency problem; it is a distributive justice problem, and no technical fix will succeed unless it addresses who can reach the water, the finance, and the support needed to farm through crisis.

Subject of Research: Ecological and governance constraints on sustainable agriculture in Palestine

Article Title: Ecological constraints on sustainable agricultural development in palestine: A socio-ecological and environmental justice perspective

Article References: Mizyed, A., & Abu-Madi, M. (2026). Ecological constraints on sustainable agricultural development in palestine: A socio-ecological and environmental justice perspective. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101680. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101680

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Keywords: Palestine, agricultural sustainability, water scarcity, environmental justice, Gaza Strip, West Bank, adaptation, resilience, food security, soil degradation, governance, mixed methods