In Iraq, including the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI), the current official number of people infected is 2,818 with 110 people dead. A curfew had been imposed that left no freedom to circulate other than for health workers and security forces. This is lifted to a curfew from 6 pm to 6 am with some regional variants. There is little social trust in the health sector institutions while the ministry of health is lacking not only human but also material resources to treat people adequately due to decades of neglect, war, invasion and sanctions. It is since the Iraqi revolution, that demands have been raised to improve the health sector and focus on local food production instead of the constant food imports, experienced as the sell-out of the country. While the pandemic interrupted the protests in which over 600 people have been killed by anti-riot-forces and militias, half of the activists had remained in Baghdad’s occupied Tahrir square, raising awareness about the coronavirus. Since May 10, activists have gathered and prepared an escalation and continuation of the protests as their demands remain unmet by the Iraqi government.
Iraq is a major importer of food, especially from Iran, also heavily affected by the pandemic, and Turkey. This reliance on imports is not due to the limited potential of Iraqi agriculture but rather due to historical and political decisions. One major factor that has fortified this situation is the international UN sanctions regime from 1990-2003, that started as a complete trade embargo and later changed into the oil-for-food programme. Thus, as the government mainly relies on food imports, Iraqi agricultural production is not the government’s top priority.
Whether it is in Kurdistan or Southern Iraq, food prices were rising at the beginning of the pandemic as traders, shop owners and others tried to raise prices. After the state intervened and forced traders and shop owners to go back to pre-pandemic prices, food prices have stabilized. Even though agriculture is neglected by the Iraqi state, it still holds an important potential for efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in those crops for which the state guarantees to buy them (mostly wheat and barley). While it is expected that 4.2 tons of cereal crops will be imported to Iraq, in 2019 Iraq was also able to produce 4.7 tonnes of wheat and 1.5 million tonnes of barley. This points to the resilience of small-scale agricultural farmers who have remained engaged in food production despite major political and economic constraints, such as the war against Da’ish (Islamic state) and an incompetent, corrupt government.
Much of the agricultural produce that is not cereal production, sold to the Iraqi state, is part of the “informal” economic sector. During the pandemia, it is those agricultural workers who were hit hardest. For example, in Kurdistan’s rainfed areas, April is the season for most village women to harvest certain local ‘mountain greens’ as part of the informal economy and sell them on sideroads and local shops. As mobility is prohibited, these cannot be sold. Thus, it is especially those farmworkers in the informal sector who are experiencing the greatest loss in daily income and whose harvest is going to waste.
In all of Iraq, including the KRI, the movement of farmers from rural areas to urban areas of Iraq was prohibited, although this is less strict today. Thus, it had been difficult to buy fertilizers or seeds. However, small-scale farmers also reported to still have their own seeds, an important aspect that enables further food production and a signal for the importance of this aspect of food sovereignty. Farmers are promised by the government to be able to move to sell their produce once they can prove to the security forces that they are farmers.
Source of the image: https://aoav.org.uk/2020/the-reverberating-effects-of-explosive-violence-on-agriculture-in-iraq/
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Schluwa Sama
Schluwa Sama Born in Kurdistan, Iraq in 1988, Schluwa is a PhD student at the Center for Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter, UK. She earned a master’s degree in ‘Politics of the Middle East’ from SOAS, University of London (2013) as well as a master’s degree in ‘Politics and Economics of the Middle East’ at the University of Marburg (Germany) (2014). Upon the completion of her masters’ degree, Schluwa has worked as a teacher and researcher in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, published on the topics of agricultural deprivation, oil economy, neoliberalism and the Iraqi revolution in Jacobin magazine, for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation, OpenDemocracy and the German media collective ‘Dis:orient’. Schluwa’s ethnographic PhD research explores processes of de(valuation) of agricultural life in Iraq through a political-economic lens. Schluwa can be reached via email: schluwa.s@gmail.com and ss874@exeter.ac.uk