The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said Syria's domestic wheat production over the next 12 months is likely to be severely compromised and that it will need to import 1.5 million tonnes of wheat for the 2013/14 season.

Domestic wheat output was seen at about 2.4 million tonnes in 2012/13, some 40 percent less than the average annual harvest of more than 4 million tonnes before the conflict.

Syria's livestock sector has also been seriously depleted by more than 2 years of the civil war, with poultry production down by more than 50 percent compared with 2011 and significant declines in numbers of sheep and cattle, the report found.

A Syrian state buyer earlier this week issued a tender to buy 200,000 tonnes of flour on the international market and planned to pay with funds from bank accounts frozen by trade sanctions.