SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – The city of Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan does not have a single silo for wheat storage and is unprepared for a possible food crisis, a local official says.
“Sulaimani is the only city in Iraq that doesn’t have a silo,” says Jamal Ismail, manager of an abandoned silo that is unfit for storage and is the city’s only such facility.
“If Kurdistan faces an economic crisis, we will not have one kilo of stocked wheat in Sulaimani,” Ismail warns.
Officials in Sulaimani say that the city is in dire need of silos to store the annual wheat bought from local farmers.
The former Iraqi government began a project to build a major silo to collect the province’s wheat production in the early 1980s, but during the Iran-Iraq war and fear of bombardment the project was abandoned.
The project’s towers still stand high at the gates of the city, and have for years been among Sulaimani’s most recognizable features.
Ismail says that all of the wheat and barley bought from local farmers is temporarily collected in makeshift storage and later shipped to Iraq’s southern provinces.
“The Iraqi government turns our wheat into flour and distributes it in all the provinces, including the Kurdistan Region,” he says.
He adds that the reason for this neglect of their “rundown and unreliable silo” is that the Kurdistan government does not have a serious plan to buy the production of local farmers.
The abandoned silo in Sulaimani has 64 compartments and can hold 48,000 tons of wheat, but Ismail says that capacity cannot accommodate the huge amount of wheat and barley produced by farmers in the province every year.
“Worse than the neglect is that the city has decided to demolish the old silo and it isn’t clear yet what they are going to build in its place,” Ismail complains.
But the local government says it plans to build four silos in Said Sadiq, Ranya, Kalar and Piramagroon each with the capacity to hold 200 thousand tons of wheat.
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