Former homes and farms in Ninawa are now just covered in sand.
niqash | Mohammed Omar al-Qaysi | Mosul |
22.11.2012
Farmers in Ninawa are being forced to abandon their farms in droves
because of desertification. And now they say, to make matters worse, those who
don’t even have farms have been claiming subsidies and seeds that belong to the
beleaguered agriculturalists.
Despite the fact that he had been there many times, the old farmer found
it almost impossible to get to the house of his brother: the whole house, in a
village in the district of Hadar, Ninawa, was almost completely covered in
sand.
“Today most of the green farmland that used to be here has gone –
because of drought and desertification,” Haleel Ahmed, 60, who grows wheat,
barley and maize and raises sheep on a farm about 23 kilometres southwest of
here, told NIQASH. “We can’t even plant anything. Even if we irrigate the land
with well water the sand just kills the plants before they grow,” Ahmed
explains sadly.
“And the people don’t have enough money to drill more wells or buy fuel
to operate water pumps,” he adds. These are just some of the reasons his
brother’s house – and the houses and farms of others here - have been
abandoned.
This is the result of desertification which Mosul
University’s Remote Sensing Centre –
which gathers information remotely, usually through aerial surveys – now says,
affects around 166,600 square kilometres of Iraq. That is closing in on half of
the country; Iraq
is only around 438,000 square kilometres big. The Remote Sensing Centre says
that this means more dust storms for everyone – about 300 days worth of them
for some cities, they estimate.
Ninawa province has plenty of desertification to call its own. The
province has very high temperatures, strong winds and high evaporation and
transpiration rates. Climate change has also had an effect and as temperatures
have risen, the districts of Hadar and Biaaj have been particularly badly
affected.
Figures released by Ninawa statisticians indicate a decrease in the
production of wheat and barley in the area between 2001 and 2010. Figures for
the past years were not available but as Muhanna al-Tak, head of the local
Department of Agriculture, said, “it’s no secret that wheat and barley
production has fallen”. .
Despite this it seems that Ninawa’s local Ministry of Water Resources
has refused to undertake a suggested project for improving local water supplies
– even though the project is estimated to cost around IQD40 billion (US$26
million).
“Soil and water tests done in our laboratories indicate that the land
here is suitable for a large number of crops, especially grains,” Sabbar
Abdullah Salih, the head of the Natural Resources Research Centre at the University of Tikrit, said.
Salih accused Ninawa authorities of not being serious about the problem
of desertification in the area.
On Oct. 10, the Iraqi parliament held a conference titled The Reality of
Agriculture in Ninawa and Salahaddin. There Ninawa’s governor, Atheel
al-Nujaifi, warned that the reasons why agriculture is suffering in Ninawa
included “lack of subsidized help and administrative problems as well as
environmental issues”.
Al-Nujaifi stressed the need for a proposed project to drill 400 more
artisan wells in areas hit by desertification, the creation of green belts and
the rehabilitation of abandoned villages. The governor also felt that all
parties needed to cooperate to come up with a strategic plan for agriculture in
the province.
Meanwhile locals blame corruption for some of the problems they are
having.
Locals in Hadar’s villages agree that 90 percent of the farmers there
have been forced to abandon their farmland and move to other areas because of
desertification and drought.
“The people of the villages have spent all their savings over the past
years,” Jihad al-Shammari, 43, the headman of Mukhtar village in the Biaaj
district, told NIQASH. “Some have sold their cattle to buy seeds and fodder
because they couldn’t get any government subsidies. Nor were there any job
opportunities that would have allowed them to stay on their land or plant it.”
As for compensation or subsidies that are given out, farmers claim
they’re going into the wrong hands. The money is apparently being handed out to
the rich rather than the poor and to individuals who have forged proof of
agricultural work or farm ownership.
A member of Hadar’s local council, Jassim Mohammed concurs, saying they
have discovered around 50 such cases and blames Department of Agriculture
officials for the problem.
The Department of Agriculture says that the forged contracts were
discovered because of complaints from local farmers and that investigations are
under way to find out who is behind the forgeries.
Meanwhile Jassim, a local seed merchant who did not want to have his
full name used, said that he suspected that farmers, with better relationships
with officials, were managing to get a bigger share of subsidized seeds – and
then they were going on to sell the seeds on the black market.
“Political infighting, the fact that Ninawa officials don’t understand
the situation properly and the tribal nature of relationships in this area has
made things difficult for local farmers,” Mohammed explains the realities of
farming in Ninawa. “Government support either goes to the district’s capital or
to people who have nothing to do with agriculture or livestock. And that is
because of the nepotism and corrupt official methods.”
All of the problems that local farmers face in Ninawa, as well as what
they see as growing corruption, sees people like Ahmed, the farmer whose
brother’s house was claimed by the desert, growing more worried.
Ahmed says that mostly they are afraid that things will return to a sort
of feudal state, where wealthy Iraqis control all the land and others simply
work on it. As a result, many local farmers are considering setting up their
own committees to call for investigations into subsidized equipment and seeds
that never reached those who needed them most.
The Independent Electoral High Commission (IEHC)reported that over 15 groups have applied to participate in the local elections.
