Kurdistan’s 5-Year Agro Plan Declared a Failure

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – A 2009 five-year plan to make the Kurdistan Region self-sufficient in crops has failed, an agricultural official confessed, adding that authorities were now seeking a new strategy.

Meanwhile, a former agriculture minister in the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, said the five-year plan had failed because inexpert planners had neglected to understand the importance of factory farming.

The five-year plan had “failed to serve its main purpose, which was to increase the production of vegetables and crops,” said Omer Faraydun, the director of Sulaimani agriculture department. He said it had only succeeded in increasing fruit and livestock production “to some degree.”

Officials said that the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Ministry of Agriculture is now working on drawing up a new plan. “Each province’s agricultural needs will be discussed in separate conferences. Later, the suggestions will be summarized under a new plan,” Faraydun said.

Jamal Fuad, former minister of agriculture, blamed the masterminds behind the plan for the failure. “They didn’t know much about agriculture. Their proposals couldn’t match the reality,” he said.

He said it had failed because planners had neglected to understand one of the most important aspects of modern agriculture: factory farming.

“Having agricultural factories is the only way to encourage the farmers to return to their villages,” he added.

Fuad also said that eight agricultural factories are needed to revive dozens of villages in both Sharazoor and Pishdar regions, the two main agricultural plains in the Kurdistan Region. “By doing so, farmers will be encouraged to grow produce in all four seasons, instead of just one,” he explained.

Building eight factories can be hugely costly for the government in the first two years, but after that they will be very profitable.

Talib Murad, advisor for food and water security at the KRG Council of Ministers, said that the plan had failed because of insufficient government funding.

“Any country that wants to improve its agriculture sector must dedicate at least 10 percent of its budget for it,” he said, “However, the KRG had dedicated less than two percent,” he added.

Murad said he was not consulted about the plan.

“I heard on the media that 80 percent of the plan had been implemented, but when I asked the finance minister how much money his ministry spent on the plan the answer was ‘zero dollars,’” said Murad,  who has worked for many years for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But finance ministry spokesman, Diler Tariq, insisted that the required budget had been dedicated to the five-year plan.

Annemiek van Waarden, a Dutch agricultural expert and entrepreneur working in Kurdistan since 2007, warns that production here is growing so slowly that it has no chance of competing with production and quality in neighboring countries.

She believes that Kurdish potato production is about half of what is produced in comparable circumstances in neighboring countries, and for fruit it is no more than one-tenth. 

She says bigger farms, loans and providing free knowledge to farmers are some of the ways the region can try to increase production and retain some of the millions of dollars now going to Syrian, Iranian and Turkish farmers whose produce floods markets across the Kurdistan Region and the rest of Iraq.