More than half a million Syrian refugees are crammed into camps in Jordan. The need to house and feed them is just one of the ways in which the Syrian conflict is devestating the Jordanian economy:

“Jordan’s economy has been devastated because of the lack of trade toward Syria going north,” said Andrew Harper, head of the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan. Syria’s unpredictable conflict is increasingly raising tensions among Jordanians as the economy continues to suffer, and resentment toward Syrian refugees is growing.

The situation is mirrored across the region. Another half million Syrian refugees are seeking shelter in Lebanon. The E.U. recently decided to try to stabilize the economic cascade effects in the country by injecting another 30 million Euros into Lebanon.

Turkey has almost  600,000 Syrian refugees. The U.N. will target that crisis with $43 million this year. The math on that is strained. It comes to only $71 per refugee over the course of a year, but is designed to cover housing, schooling, medical care, and other basic needs.

The U.N. High Commission for Refugees is trying to address displacement within Syria. More than 4 million Syrians have been driven from their homes, though the U.N. puts the number of those needing aid – due to “frequent power cuts, fuel shortages, damage to infrastructure and disruption to water works” – at 6.8 million. The UNHCR is calling for another $113 million dollars for its work.

[Photo: Guest2625 / Wiki Commons]