Fri, Jul 06, 2018 page6

• Iraq bans farming of summer crops as water shortage crisis becomes dire

  • AP, MISHKHAB, Iraq
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  Iraq has banned its farmers from planting summer crops this year as the country grapples with a crippling water shortage that has shown few signs of abating.

  Citing high temperatures and insufficient rains, Dhafer Abdalla, an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources, told reporters that the country has only enough water to irrigate half of its farmland this summer.

  However, farmers fault the government for failing to modernize how it manages water and irrigation, and they have blamed neighboring Turkey for stopping up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers behind dams it wants to keep building.

  

  A farmer walks through his fallow field in Mishkhab, Iraq, on Tuesday last week.

  Photo: AP

  Water levels across the two vital rivers — which together give Iraq its ancient name, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers — fell by more than 60 percent in two decades, a 2012 UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report showed.

  The orders against sowing rice, corn and other crops this summer came as a shock to the towns and villages in the once fertile plains south of Baghdad, where the local economy depends on farming.

  One in five Iraqis works in agriculture. In Iraq’s rice belt, the farmland is cracked and dry.

  “I feel as though my very existence has been shaken,” farmer Akeel Kamil said, as he surveyed his barren fields in the village of Mishkhab.

  His 100 dunams — about 10 hectares — last year produced 136 tonnes of Anbar rice, a strain particular to Iraq that is prized for its gentle, floral aroma.

  This year, the pumps that would be flooding his fields with water are silent, and the irrigation canal that runs by his property is nearly empty.

  Flood irrigation has been used in the area for millennia, although the FAO has warned of massive water wastage.

  It and other organizations have called on the Iraqi government to revamp its approach to agriculture and promote more efficient methods, including drip-and-spray irrigation.

  The ministry has said that it does not have the budget to do that.

  Farmers staged demonstrations against the moratorium. In one instance, they forced the closure of a levee along a branch of the Euphrates River to let the water levels rise for irrigation.

  They have demanded that the government secure more water from Turkey, fill the country’s reservoirs and drill into the nation’s aquifers.

  “When we protested, no one listened to us. Then we closed the levee, and the police came and the politicians started calling us vandals. Is this how a government behaves with its people?” said Mahdi al-Mhasen, a 48-year-old farmhand in Mishkhab.

  The rumblings will be heard in Baghdad. South Iraq is the popular base of the Shiite blocs that have led Iraqi governments since Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003.

  The rice belt hugs Najaf, Shiite Islam’s holiest city, where theologians and politicians have powerful influence.

  Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shiite authority in Iraq, castigated lawmakers, telling the government it must help farmers, and modernize irrigation and agriculture.

  In response to the pressure, the government said it reversed its ban on rice farming.

  However, Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture spokesman Hameed al-Naief told reporters that only 5,000 dunams of irrigated land could be allocated to the crop this summer, less than 3 percent of the area permitted last year.

  The impact of waning water resources is clear around Mishkhab.

  Local divers and river patrols have said their branch of the Euphrates is far shallower than it was this time last year.

  Green scum collects under bridges where the water has stagnated and fishing boats are stranded on the river bed.

  Earlier this summer, video on social media showed the water levels of the Tigris River so low that Iraqis in Baghdad were crossing it on foot.

  About 70 percent of Iraq’s water supplies flow in from upstream countries. Turkey is siphoning off an ever-growing share of the Tigris and Euphrates to feed its growing population, and it is building new dams that will further squeeze water availability in Iraq.

  Syria is expected to start drawing more water off the Euphrates once it emerges from its years-long civil war.

  Turkey last month started filling its giant upstream Ilisu Dam, then paused the operation until this month after pleas from Baghdad.

  The Ministry of Water Resources has said it has enough water behind the Mosul Dam to guarantee adequate flow for a year, but experts have said the Ilisu could take up to three years to fill, depending on rains.

  The last moratorium on farming rice came in 2009, but that year farmers were permitted to grow other crops to shore up their income. This year, there is no such reprieve.

  While it is OPEC’s third-largest oil producer, Iraq, unlike Saudi Arabia, does not distribute oil revenue to the general population.

  Farmers in Mishkhab have said they have little to fall back on with the loss of the summer season’s income.

  Families that depend on credit to cover their expenses during the growing season are afraid their lenders — shop owners, mechanics, even friends — will not lend to them this year, because they know the rice harvest has been canceled.

  “What will happen to our lands?” Kamil asked. “Should we leave them? Should we move to the cities?”
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