ICARDA Caravan, Issue No. 22

Focus

The Potential of Partnership
with the Jabbans of Syria

Malika Abdelali-Martini, Aden Aw-Hassan, and Hisham Salahieh

The migratory lifestyle of the Jabbans, or cheese makers, in Syria is slowly changing, especially in terms of working places. They are moving from the Khanasser Valley towards the steppe where more dairy sheep are raised. ICARDA took a closer look at this group to better understand how this small-scale informal industry works, the services it provides to local communities, and what technological improvements could be introduced through partnership with the Jabbans.

Jamal Yussef Steif and his family.

or most of the year, Jamal Yussef Steif (Abu Khaled) works on his farm in Tel A'adeh village in Idlib province, Syria, with his wife, Um Khaled, and their three children. But every spring, during the milking season, the family members leave their farm and travel to Adameh village in the Khanasser Valley, a dry marginal area located in northwest Syria, where sheep production is a dominant source of income, to become Jabbans or cheese makers. Many other Jabbans come from the same area to Khanasser.

Making Cheese in the Dry Areas

Livestock producers in Khanasser Valley take their flocks to the nearby hills early in the morning to graze. The women milk the animals at around 11:00 am and walk over to the Jabbans house or tent usually on the outskirts of the village, to deliver fresh milk.

The delivery of the milk marks the beginning of a busy day for the cheese maker’s family. The Jabbans usually process the milk collected from the village. But, during the last few years, with the improvements in communication means and roads, some of them have started collecting milk from neighboring villages too. In that case, the man usually leaves for the neighboring villages in his pickup truck, and collects the milk in large blue containers that fill the back of his truck.

When milk is delivered, the Jabban women (usually wife and daughters, or in other cases joined by other women relatives) start the cheese making process. To make the cheese, Um Khaled pours the milk into large containers, filtering it through a piece of tightly-stretched thin cloth to ensure its cleanliness. Each container holds around 80/90 liters of milk. Once the container is full, Um Khaled adds a spoonful of rennet and stirs the milk.

Then she covers the containers and leaves them for an hour or so; by then the milk congeals into large chunks of cheese. After the hour is over, Um Khaled stirs the container once again and then transfers small quantities of the chunks into a round dish that she places in a large sink. The water oozing from the wet cheese drains into a small hose that runs out into a metal container at the back of the house. This drained water is later used to make cheese (called Arisheh) that is of lower quality and is bought by the poor.

Um Khaled ties the cheese into a tight round packet. Once she has four or five of these packets, she piles them on top of each other into a press. She tightens the press every few hours to keep the water squeezing out. Um Khaled goes through this process many times a day with the milk that the villagers bring her and that which her husband has collected from the villages nearby. She converts around 400-800 litres of milk into cheese each day.

In about three hours, the cheese is ready. By 5 a.m. the next morning, it is sold to middle-men or traders through the Jabbans who take it to the market. The cheese made by the Jabbans and by local communities cannot be eaten directly. It is first boiled (since the milk is not pasteurized before the cheese is made) and sometimes additional flavorings are added. This value-adding is done by men workers at the middle-men level and then the cheese that is preserved in containers filled with salt and water is ready to be sold.

A Serious Decline
Since the 1970s, milk in the Khanasser Valley has been processed into cheese by Jabbans' institutions. These institutions provide fundamental services to farmers such as access to the markets in cities, input supply, and credit and safety nets against unexpected shortfalls due to drought or crop and livestock losses. Hence they play a critical role in the livelihoods of the rural poor. But the number of Jabbans has seriously declined. In the 1970s, 77% of the villages in the Khanasser Valley had at least a Jabban each. In 2003, only 23% had a Jabban each. ICARDA scientists conducted a survey to understand the reasons for this decline.

Women in the Khanasser Valley usually milk the sheep.

More than 55% of the farmers surveyed cited the decline in numbers of dairy sheep in the Valley and, the consequent decline in milk production, as well as the replacement of fallow land with cumin cultivations, which resulted in less land available for grazing, as the most important reasons for the decline in the number of Jabbans. Many dairy sheep producers have shifted towards lamb fattening through investors and traders from Aleppo city. Other reasons reported were that farmers are making more yogurt rather than cheese because of its better price in the markets, and the improved means of communication; and sometimes there is a lack of consensus on the prices of milk.

Despite the decline in the numbers of Jabbans, cheese processing remains an important area and a source of additional income for the poor compared to sheep fattening. Cheese making is an inherently sustainable activity because the money provides additional income directly to the livestock owners, whereas fattening costs are provided by investors in the city, and depends on live sheep export regulations.

How the Jabbans Serve the Local Communities
The Jabbans are an example of a local institution with embedded social capital. The social capital of a society is the institutions, relationships, attitudes, and values between various players that contribute to a mutual economic and social development. The local institutions of dairy production provide through Jabbans fundamental services to dairy sheep producers, such as marketing, input supply, loans and safety nets against unexpected shortfalls due to drought or crop and livestock losses. The Jabbans also handle small quantities of milk delivered by the poorest, which cannot be marketed otherwise, especially in the absence of a formal infrastructure and easy access to markets.

Middle-men boil the cheese made by the Jabbans before selling it.

However, the benefits of participating in local institutional arrangements may be uneven and the poor may be disadvantaged because of their weak negotiating position and vulnerability that limits their options. Results from a study of 44 villages in the Khanasser Valley, revealed the local institutional arrangements in relation to sheep milk production and processing and the embedded social capital. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the research analyzed the terms of arrangements between traders and dairy sheep producers in milk collection, delivery, processing and marketing to determine whether there was equity of benefits between all the players involved. The factors that determine the payment for milk delivered to traders/processors, the distributional effects of these arrangements and the factors influencing the poor's access to these institutions were also analyzed. They revealed an interesting parallelism of known relations between farmers and milk processing plants. This analysis aims at developing adequate recommendations to improve dairy production using the Jabbans' institutions as a vehicle for change.

The use of the sustainable livelihood approach which focuses on people and looks for sustainability of achievements, provided a holistic perspective, and was implemented through partners; the most important feature of the approach is that it builds on strengths of the people, particularly the poor.

The Gender Dimension in Dairy Production

During the survey, the research identified a clear gender division of activities in dairy production, processing and marketing. The farmers/milk producers are represented by both men and women, though it is mostly the women who provide most of their time to livestock care, and milk production and processing. However, among the Jabbans, it is mainly the women and children who are involved in milk production and cheese processing, whereas the men handle the marketing and usually control the income as well. The middlemen/traders are only men. This gender division becomes important when newly-developed technologies are transferred to the farmers. Technologies related to milk processing should then reach both types of milk producers. Hygiene and basic health issues should start at the farm and at the Jabbans levels at the same time.

Conclusion and Future Work
Though imperfect, local institutions provide essential services to the poor particularly in the absence of adequate infrastructure and markets. Milk producers have multiple benefits from cheese makers/traders such as access to market and loans. They are very well organized and trusted by the communities, and attuned to traditional environment. These institutions could serve as a substitute to formal institutions and safety nets, but need to be strengthened to take additional roles and responsibilities that serve the poor.

The research raises questions on whether it would be possible to introduce improved dairy technology to the milk producers through Jabbans and what role current arrangements play, how any new technology will change the total value of the dairy products and the distribution of the benefits, and whether the Jabbans could be used as a means for reaching the poor in the delivery of credit. Another challenge is to assess whether these arrangements could be considered as safety nets for the communities, and what interventions could help stabilize or sustain the production system.

Dr Malika Abdelali-Martini (m.martini@cgiar.org) is a Socioeconomic and Gender Analysis Specialist; Dr Aden Aw-Hassan is an Agricultural Economist; and Dr Hisham Salahieh is a Research Associate at ICARDA.

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