From IRIN we read about the grow­ing food inse­cu­rity in Iraq. 80 per­cent of Iraq’s food is imported, and this arti­cle makes the case that lack of sup­port to local agri­cul­ture is to blame.

More and more peo­ple in Iraq are being affected by food inse­cu­rity, a senior offi­cial has said.

Reduced domes­tic agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, infla­tion, unem­ploy­ment and a crum­bling sys­tem of sub­si­dized food dis­tri­b­u­tions have hit poor peo­ple the hardest.

“There is still a big per­cent­age of Iraqi peo­ple who can’t secure enough food. With unem­ploy­ment run­ning at 18–20 per­cent they can’t buy what they need,” said Muna Turki Al-Mousawi, head of the state-run Cen­tre for Mar­ket Research and Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion, adding that about 20 per­cent of Iraq’s 25 mil­lion peo­ple live below the poverty line.

Domes­tic agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion — already affected by reduced rain­fall — has also been hit by a lack of gov­ern­ment sup­port and lax con­trols on cheap food imports, with which farm­ers can­not com­pete in some cases, she said.

On 31 August, the UN Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion (FAO) said Iraq had its worst cereal har­vest in a decade and that its wheat har­vest was set to fall to one mil­lion tonnes, from an aver­age of 3.5 mil­lion tonnes per annum over the past decade. Domes­tic rice pro­duc­tion also fell from an aver­age 500,000 tons a year to an esti­mated 250,000 tons this year.

Iraq imports more than 80 per­cent of its food needs, al-Mousawi told IRIN.

The crum­bling sub­si­dized food dis­tri­b­u­tion scheme which was set up in the 1990s and designed to sup­ply basic food items to poor peo­ple as part of the UN oil-for-food pro­gramme is mak­ing mat­ters worse. At least 60 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion depends on the sub­si­dized food, accord­ing to Iraqi Trade Min­istry figures.

There are qual­ity and dis­tri­b­u­tion prob­lems: “We have com­ments on the qual­ity of the food items. And it never reaches the fam­i­lies in time or in suf­fi­cient quan­ti­ties. Some of its items are only dis­trib­uted 8–10 months a year,” she said, con­trast­ing the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion with that prior to 2003 when “there was a kind of sta­bil­ity with regard to food secu­rity nation­wide as there was con­trol of imported food and gov­ern­ment sup­port to agriculture.”

Gov­ern­ment sup­port for farmers?

After 2003, she said, the bor­ders were opened to ran­dom imports with­out real scrutiny, and gov­ern­ment sup­port for farm­ers dimin­ished, adversely affect­ing domes­tic pro­duc­tion, which could not com­pete with cheaper imports.

“The gov­ern­ment has real­ized these dan­gers over the past two years and started to sup­port the farm­ers and impose restric­tions on food imports, and yet we are still far from the self-sufficiency we had, as we are only pro­duc­ing 20 per­cent of our food needs,” she said.

Three draft laws which aim to pro­tect local pro­duc­tion and reg­u­late imports, if approved, could dra­mat­i­cally improve the sit­u­a­tion, al-Mousawi said.

Abdul-Zahra Al-Hindawi, spokesman for the Iraqi Plan­ning Ministry’s Cen­tral Orga­ni­za­tion for Sta­tis­tics and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (COSIT), esti­mates that about 23 per­cent of Iraqis live below the poverty line, mean­ing they earn US$66 a month or less.

“One quar­ter of the whole pop­u­la­tion is not a small per­cent­age. It needs a lot of think­ing and eco­nomic strate­gies to help change this real­ity and improve it,” he said.

COSIT is set to present a national five-year anti-poverty strat­egy to the Cab­i­net by the end of November.