Food security expert Dr. Fadel ELZUBI noted that anyone visiting the Jordan Valley returns home praising its beauty—green plains stretching to the horizon, plastic houses glistening under the sun, citrus, banana, and palm trees pleasing the eye. Yet behind this beauty lies another story: that of a farmer living under constant pressure—fear of frost, drought, fires, and water scarcity. He begins his day before dawn, never certain whether his harvest will reach the market or vanish overnight.
From Adassiya and Baqoura in the north, through Shouneh al-Shamaliyah, Manshieh, Waqas, Mashare’, Wadi al-Yabis, and Kureima, down to the central and southern valleys, extends Jordan’s food basket. This narrow strip below sea level grants the Kingdom a rare agricultural advantage in the region: early vegetables, citrus that meet domestic demand with surplus for export, and tens of thousands of families relying on farming as their main income. Each productive dunum sustains a chain of workers, transporters, input suppliers, and wholesale markets.
ELZUBI stressed that summer fires in the Valley are the clearest example of this fragility. Every heatwave consumes farmland, sometimes in border areas difficult to reach. Farmers lose trees they nurtured for years, only to discover there is no insurance policy to protect them and no compensation mechanism to restore production.
He explained that the Valley burns twice each season: once due to harsh climate—heatwaves, drought, frost, and scarce irrigation water—and once due to the absence of effective tools to transfer risk and compensate farmers. The first fire is geographic fate; the second is institutional design that can, and must, be extinguished.
The risks are accelerating before our eyes. The 2024/2025 rainy season was among the driest in recent memory, followed by 2025/2026 with better rainfall totals but revealing a more dangerous pattern: long dry spells interrupted by sudden heavy rains. Such volatility defies planning. Citrus yields decline with each heatwave, open-field vegetables are destroyed by winter frost, fruit trees struggle under repeated thirst, while production costs—from seeds and fertilizers to energy and labor—continue to rise, eroding farmers’ ability to absorb any further loss.
ELZUBI emphasized that the real problem is not the disaster itself, but the absence of an institutional system to return farmers to production. Banks hesitate to lend to a sector exposed to risk, commercial insurers are nearly absent from agriculture, and government compensation—when it arrives—is late and partial. Each frost or drought wave pushes more farmers to abandon their land, and their children to join the ranks of job seekers.
He recalled that the Agricultural Risk Management Fund was established more than 15 years ago, long remaining a legal framework without real activation, before beginning to compensate frost damage. Recently, it was restructured under a new law expanding coverage and raising compensation rates—a commendable step. Yet fairness requires asking fundamental questions: Was the Fund designed for today’s climate risks or yesterday’s disasters? Is its financing commensurate with the sector’s size? Are damage assessment procedures fast and fair from the farmer’s perspective? And most importantly: does the Fund truly cover drought, or only specific, observable disasters?
ELZUBI clarified that the aim is not to criticize an institution—the Fund’s staff operate within the limits of its design and financing—but to acknowledge that the model itself has exhausted its capacity. What is needed is a more sustainable system, with index-based climate insurance as its backbone, protecting both farmers and the national economy.
He pointed to international lessons: Morocco developed a multi-risk agricultural insurance program covering about one million hectares of cereals and legumes, placing drought—the greatest threat to Moroccan agriculture—at the core of coverage, with direct government support for premiums that encouraged hundreds of thousands of farmers to join. Kenya went further with small farmers and pastoralists, using satellite imagery and vegetation indices: when data indicated pasture deterioration, compensation reached herders before their herds perished. These programs were linked to food security and social protection.
The common lesson for Jordan is clear: the state supports premiums but does not monopolize the system; the private sector shares the risk; independent data replace subjective judgment; and small farmers are the design’s centerpiece, not its margin.
ELZUBI concluded that protecting the Jordan Valley—and agriculture as a whole—is no longer a sectoral issue for one ministry, but a matter of food, social, and economic security. A farmer who loses his season does not lose income alone: his family suffers, his workers stop, food chains are disrupted up to the consumer’s table in Amman, Irbid, and Karak. When losses repeat without protection, abandoning the land becomes rational for the farmer but strategic loss for the state. The required shift is from reactive “crisis response” to preventive planning. Farmers need not only compensation after loss, but a safety net before disaster strikes.
He called for launching a national climate agricultural insurance program, starting with two or three crops in the Valley and rain-fed cereal areas, then expanding gradually. This requires an institutional partnership bringing together the Ministry of Agriculture, the Risk Fund, insurance companies, banks, and universities; a national open database of climate and agricultural indicators (since index insurance requires reliable indices); use of satellites to monitor drought, fires, and vegetation cover; government support for premiums in the early years; and genuine involvement of farmers’ associations, unions, and cooperatives in designing insurance products. Finally, a special protection plan for the Jordan Valley should integrate insurance with efficient irrigation, early warning, and fire control.