Down on the Farm
Though one might never infer it from the press coverage, most Iraqis do not live in the Baghdad morgue. Twenty-five percent of Iraqis work in agriculture, a sector that is recovering from decades of Ba’athist misrule. Farming is the nation’s premier vocational sector, and second-largest generator of GNP.
Historically, Mesopatamian civilization was built on the fertile floodplains of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. As late as the 1950s, Iraq was a major regional exporter of wheat, and an international exporter of dates. The provinces of Nineveh and Wasit produced millions of tons of wheat and barley annually.
Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran wiped out 70 percent of his nation’s date palm orchards. Ba’athist “economy” was built on oil revenues, protected by a security-state recruited in the Sunni triangle. The southern provinces were, essentially, starved. Critical irrigation works were allowed to atrophy. Saddam drained the marshlands in his war against the Shi’ia after Operation Desert Storm – an act that dislocated (and starved) hundreds of thousands of agricultural-dependent Iraqis.
Today, Iraq – once called “the Fertile Crescent” – imports $3 billion of foodstuffs annually to keep its people alive.
The turgid prose of the U.S. Agency for International Development lists the programmatic details of Coalition efforts to revive Iraq’s agricultural sector:
- supplies of grade 1 grain seed,
- supplies of agricultural fertilizer,
- tractor repair and maintenance programs,
- the replanting of date palm orchards,
- the restoration of marshlands (and with it, habitat for fish and wild fowl),
- the establishment of new vineyards,
- livestock vaccination campaigns, and
- Iraqi veterinary training programs.
But recent reports from Iraq chronicle not programs, but results. In “Southern province reaps bumper harvest,” Ali al-Alaq, writing in www.Azzaman.com/English/ – a site furiously hostile to the United States – reports an increase in the Wasit wheat harvest from 48,000 tons in 2005 to 200,000 tons in 2006. He cites Iraqi agricultural officials:
Salam Iskandar said this year’s yield of 200,000 tons of both wheat and barley is a record in the province’s history. It is roughly four times higher than last year’s yields of 48,000 tons, he said. Wasit, of which the city of Kut is capital, lies 160 kilomenters south of Baghdad, in a fertile cereal grain-growing region.
The bumper crop enabled Wasit farmers to ship 110,000 tons of wheat and 90,000 tons of barley to state silos. In other words, the crop for sale, above subsistence, exceeded the preceding year’s total harvest by 100%.
Iskandar, writes al-Alaq, attributed the “spectacular surge in wheat produce this year” to “the use of better seeds, fertilizers, and good incentives.”