Kurdistan Region imports $7billion worth of fruit and vegetables in a decade

“If the government had allocated just 10 percent of its budget to agriculture there wouldn’t have been the need to import that much fruit and vegetables,” Anwar Omar, head of planning and follow-up department at the ministry of agriculture told Rudaw.

Data from the agriculture ministry shows that between 2004-2014 the Kurdistan Region imported $7.1 billion worth of fruit and vegetables from abroad, mainly from Iran and Turkey.

Omar believes that except for lack of government funding, the Kurdistan Region has all the elements needed to become self-sufficient.

“The Kurdistan Region has the manpower, expertise, land and climate required to produce those products and we have the right plans for it too,” he said. “But the problem is the small size of the budget dedicated to us.”

Omar says the Kurdistan Region Government (KRG) can easily become self-reliant and establish a solid food security if it allocates a better budget for the agricultural sector and even make it a major contributor to the economy.

KRG’s ministry of agriculture twice designed five-year plans to boost the sector, first plan announced in 2009 and second in 2015 but both plans failed to meet their goal for lack of sufficient funding.

The ministry needs $1.3billion to set into motion its new five-tear plan, officials say, but the ongoing financial crisis has dried up any hope for funding to come from the government.

Omar says lack of money means the ministry cannot help farmers with “reliable seeds, combing agricultural diseases and marketing,”

The financial crisis on the other hand has naturally returned some interest to farming due to lack of cash for further imports, though it is still at a primitive level, says Omar.

The ministry says that Kurdish farmers have only been able to supply 20 percent of the region’s demand for fruit and 50 percent of vegetables, thus forcing the market to resort to imports to meet the demand.