By Rawa Abdulla
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Osman Hamza, a 51-year-old farmer, looks forward to a productive harvest from his enormous wheat fields in the Qoshtapa village, west of Erbil.
Kurdish officials say they are looking forward to more land being used to grow wheat, and a larger crop.
“I intend to grow wheat in every inch of my 70 dunam land,” Hamza says confidently, sizing his property by the old Ottoman measure, where every dunam equals about 2,500 square meters.
Though he used only parts of his land last year, it still yielded 70 tons of wheat, which he sold to the government at a price of $660 per ton.
As of July this year, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has purchased over 802,000 tons of wheat, equivalent to nearly $532 million. Of that, $46,000 went to Hamza, for his 70 tons of wheat.
The harvest season in Kurdistan usually begins in November and continues till mid-January.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, this year over 3 million dunam of land will be cultivated, with an estimated 1,2 million tons of production.
But the ministry says the country has over 6 million dunam lands that could be used for farming.
During the last seven years, the allocated land has almost doubled from 1.9 to over 3.1 million dunam, which also shows that the business is thriving.
“Some 105,000 dunam was unfarmed last year in the war zones, which we hope to use this year since calm is restored in these areas,” Anwar Omar, an official at the ministry, told Rudaw.
He says the ministry’s policy of helping farmers has benefitted both sides, as more farmers have taken advantage of the opportunity and boosted cultivation.
“We purchase farmers’ wheat at a reasonable price and give them seeds for the next crop season at very low prices, which has returned positive results,” Omar says.
According to the ministry, the area of land harvested for wheat has increased by nearly 80 percent in the last decade, with Erbil province enjoying the greatest agricultural growth.
Government statistics show that agriculture contributes to 10 percent of the total GDP in the region, with 9 percent of the population relying on farming for its livelihood.
The KRG offers farmers’ subsidies estimated at $250 million a year. The government invested $677 million between 2006-2013 and is projected to invest an estimated $1.2 billion by 2020.
But the economic crisis in Iraq has also affected the farmers in Kurdistan, who fear the central government in Baghdad is no longer able to purchase portions of their harvests this year.
“The Iraqi government has not indicated anything like that, but if they do, we will find buyers outside the country,” Anwar says.
In Kurdistan, a long-standing oil and budget dispute with Baghdad has created a financial crunch, affecting even landowners like Hamza.
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