Source: AFP
After four years of drought, Iraqi farmer Mohammed Sami was ready to abandon his father’s parched land, but then a water-saving irrigation system revived his crops and his hopes.
They are among hundreds of farmers in the country who have been hit by heat, scarce rain and depleted rivers to benefit from new water management systems brought in by the UN World Food Programme.
The systems use automatic sprinklers and drip irrigation to ensure that scarce water is used in the most efficient way and is not lost as runoff or evaporated under the hot sun.
“Since 2019, due to the lack of water, we have not been able to cultivate the land,” said 38-year-old Sami in the village of Al-Azraqiyya in central Anbar province.
Devastated by the drought that turned his 10 dunums, or about one hectare, of land into desert, Sami began working in a nearby town as a day laborer several years ago.
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“I thought about giving up farming for good,” he said.
But then, two years ago, Sami’s outlook changed and his land blossomed again.
WFP helped with a new automated irrigation system that waters his field for just two hours a day, two to three days a week.
Source: AFP
“Now I irrigate 10 donnas with the same amount of water I used for one donnas before,” he said, adding that the wheat crop had shot up from seven to 12 tons annually.
Last year WFP’s work helped more than 1,100 farmers “in the areas most affected by climate change and drought,” said Khansae Ghazi of the UN agency’s office in Baghdad.
The new irrigation systems “use 70 percent less water than traditional methods like flooding” — the far more wasteful method used for millennia.
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Modern techniques allow farmers to grow a variety of crops year-round, including barley, cucumber, watermelon and eggplant, and reduce “reliance on unpredictable rainfall,” the WFP said.
Country of two rivers
Still recovering from years of war and chaos, Iraq is one of the five countries most affected by some of the effects of climate change, according to the United Nations.
The site of ancient Mesopotamia, where civilizations flourished on the banks of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Iraq now suffers extreme water scarcity, exacerbated by damming upstream in Iran and Turkey.
“Iraq is the land of two rivers, its civilization, which is more than 7,000 years old, has always been based on agriculture,” said Ministry of Agriculture spokesman Mohammed al-Hazai.
Source: AFP
“For decades, the country has been affected by floods and not by drought.”
But as rainfall has become more erratic and water scarcer, leaving aquifers depleted, many farmers have abandoned their plots in the new dusty areas.
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During the 2021–2022 season, agricultural sector productivity fell by 36 percent from the previous year, according to the WFP.
Government authorities have restricted water use for agriculture to ensure adequate drinking water for Iraq’s 43 million inhabitants.
To combat the problem, the ministry has also started offering irrigation systems that farmers can pay back in a decade, with the state covering 30 percent of the cost.
“In the beginning, it was difficult for the farmer to switch to modern irrigation,” Khazai said.
But now the ministry hopes to boost harvests to more than six million tonnes of wheat in 2024, up from five million last year.
This would exceed Iraq’s domestic needs and represent a big jump from around two million tonnes in 2022.
The UN agency warns that there are limits to the gains made by the new techniques.
“While modern irrigation systems can significantly improve water efficiency and agricultural practices in Iraq, it may not be enough to address the complex issue of drought,” he said.
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Source: AFP
But for now, farmers are happy with the gains they’re seeing, including Swad Mehdi in Al-Azrakiya village near the Euphrates, who said she doubled her harvest.
The 40-year-old grows wheat and barley in the winter and corn, tomatoes and eggplants in the summer on her one-hectare plot.
“It used to take us two days to water our crops,” he said. Now, he fills a basin with river water and then turns on the sprinklers, a task that “doesn’t take more than two hours.”
Source: AFP