Part of a foreign-funded project to improve agriculture in Iraq may be switched from Mosul to the Kurdistan Region after the country’s second-largest city fell to Islamist insurgents last month.
A key stage of the Iraq Conservation Agriculture Programme, launched in 2005, was abandoned in Mosul shortly after the arrival of the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which runs the programme, is now considering moving it to the safety of autonomous Kurdistan, according to the organization’s Dr. Stephen Loss.
“Conservation agriculture would certainly help Kurdistan become more self-sufficient in grain production,” Loss said.
The Mosul stage of the project, which is funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), involved plans to manufacture 16 so-called zero-tillage seeders which are designed to boost grain production.
Since the project began, 15,000 hectares of Iraqi land have been converted to zero-tillage farming. Using the same amount of resources, wheat production increases of between 13 and 22 per cent have been observed.
Loss says the scrapping of the Mosul seeders would be a major limitation on the programme and would restrict the adoption in Iraq of what is known as conservation agriculture. Crops in general were likely to decline.
Dr. Saad Hatem Mohammed, an economist at the Iraqi agriculture ministry, also painted a worrying picture about the progress of conservation agriculture given the present uncertainty. He said the ministry, which has supported the project though outreach activities and by supplying vehicles, equipment and facilities, would not be able to continue its assistance under current circumstances.
The programme was inaugurated nine years ago in a country where food security is fragile. Decades of wars and sanctions, and crippling droughts associated with climate change, had decimated agriculture in the land of its birth, leaving Iraq dependent on food imports.
The United Nations has estimated that six per cent of the Iraqi population are food deprived and a further 14 per cent are vulnerable in terms of food security.
In recent years, however, efforts to apply the food production method of conservation agriculture have yielded promising results.
Loss said conservation agriculture benefits both farmers and the land they cultivate by reducing the effort and cost of farming while simultaneously protecting and improving the quality of agricultural soils, conserving water and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Conservation agriculture is based on three vital components: minimizing soil disturbance, maintaining soil cover, and crop rotation. Yearly crop rotation helps to control weeds, pests and diseases more effectively by disrupting cycles that accrue when the same crop is grown year after year.
“It also benefits in terms of social paybacks, as farmers expend less time, money and effort, local manufacturing drives local employment up, and rural incomes are improved,” Loss added.
Loss has been overseeing the project since 2012 and says many farmers and researchers were initially skeptical that conservation agriculture could be successful in the dry soils prevalent throughout the Middle East.
The agriculture ministry’s Dr. Mohammed recalled a conversation with a farmer from Nineveh province last year. “He told me that by employing conservation agriculture techniques, he used only 30 kilograms of seed per dunam compared to 50 kilograms per dunam using the traditional method, and his fuel usage declined from 36 litres per hectare to eight litres per hectare.”
Mohammed noted that adoption of conservation agriculture methods outside the project area was further evidence of its success. This year, despite the challenging conditions on the ground, and as word of the benefits continued to trickle out from Nineveh, farmers in Anbar also expressed their interest in switching over to conservation agriculture.
According to Loss: “Back of the envelope calculations suggest the economic benefit of conservation agriculture is around USD $300 per hectare in Iraq. If 50% of Iraqi wheat and barley was switched to conservation agriculture, the net benefit would be about USD $800 million per annum, not to mention other crops,” Loss explains.
A Centre for Conservation Agriculture Research was established at the University of Mosul earlier this year, before the ISIS takeover.
Its coordinator, Dr. Abdulsattar al-Rijabo, says the priorities are to increase the scientific capacity of staff and to build on the strong relationships already established with farmers.
Even now, al-Rijabo remains optimistic that research efforts will be able to continue.
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