Gaza Farmers Rebuild on Rubble, Testing Food System Resilience

In pockets of Gaza where fighting has temporarily abated, farmers are clearing rubble from fields and attempting to restart production using informal seed-sharing networks and hand tools, after the industrial supply chains supporting agriculture — fertiliser, irrigation equipment, fuel for pumps — were destroyed. Al Jazeera's reporting documents small cooperative efforts producing vegetables on plots measured in dunams rather than hectares, barely denting a food deficit running into millions of daily calories.

The gap between these efforts and meaningful food security illustrates what systems thinkers call the difference between coping capacity and recovery capacity. Farmers can cope — planting what seeds remain in whatever soil is accessible — but recovery requires restored supply chains, functioning markets, and critically, the removal of import restrictions on seeds, fertiliser, and equipment that Israel's blockade has maintained. Without that, small-scale agriculture functions as visible proof of resilience without delivering nutritional impact at scale.

The metric to track is not acreage planted but caloric output relative to Gaza's 2.1 million population. When — and if — import restrictions on agricultural inputs ease, the speed of production recovery will reveal whether Gaza's farming knowledge and social organisation survived the war intact, or whether the destruction of infrastructure has made the land itself temporarily uncultivable.