Drought in the Fertile Crescent: Iraqi farmers abandon their land due to lack of rain

Khamis Ahmad Abbas, an Iraqi wheat farmer, lost everything when the drought forced him to abandon his land and put him out of work.

Experts warn that the lack of rainfall, exacerbated by climate change, threatens to cause a social and economic disaster in Iraq, ravaged by war.

“The cultivation of wheat and barley is a lottery. It all depends on the rain, ”said the 42-year-old father of nine children.

Unable to make ends meet, Abbas abandoned his lands in the Nineveh Plains, northeast of Mosul, located in the so-called Fertile Crescent, where agriculture was born 12,000 years ago.

With temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius and little rain, Abbas’s fields quickly dried up.

Three months ago, he and his family – two wives and nine children – moved to Mosul. “Now I am unemployed,” he told AFP, while spending time in a cafeteria in Iraq’s second city.

Mosul, once the seat of the Islamic State group’s self-styled “caliphate,” continues to rebuild after the devastating 2017 battle that drove out the jihadists.

“Sometimes I get small jobs, just enough to feed my family,” says Abbas bitterly, who longs for the days when he harvested wheat and barley like his father and grandfather before him.

Their situation is similar to that of many farmers on the Nineveh Plains.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 447 families who had to abandon their lands in Nineveh by the Islamic State and who returned to them after the defeat of the jihadists, sand were forced to leave again between June and July of this year because of the drought.

“Almost all, if not all, families were displaced due to the inability to feed their livestock,” IOM said.

The most affected province

For centuries, the Nineveh plains were the breadbasket of Iraq, with 6,000 km2 of arable land, said the spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture, Hamid al-Nayef.

But this year, the province of Nineveh has been the “worst hit” in Iraq by drought and exceptionally high temperatures.

In 2020, 927,000 tonnes of wheat were harvested in Nineveh, making it a “self-sufficient” province, said Abdelwahab al-Jarjiri, who heads the local grain authority. This year production was reduced to 89,000 tonnes due to the drought.

The effects of low rainfall have been compounded by falling water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as a result of the construction of dams in neighboring countries, Turkey and Iran, said Samah Hadid, of the NGO Norwegian Refugee Counci (NRC).

“Far from being a problem in the distant future, climate change is already having an effect in the region and we see it clearly in some parts of Iraq,” he said.

This month, a dam near the northern city of Zawita dried up completely for the first time since its construction in 2009, said the head of the local irrigation authority Hega Abdelwahid.

The dam, which used to hold up to 50,000 m3 of water, was fed by melting snow, but this year there has been very little rain, Abdelwahid said, and all that’s left is cracked earth.

Displacement and instability

The severity of the drought has forced many farming families to abandon their land and make a living in urban areas.

Akram Yassin, 28, is one of those who is considering that possibility. He has already sold some of his 500 sheep and some land just “to survive,” he said.

“I may have to change my profession, my economic losses are greater than my earnings,” he says.

In October, UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), called for “urgent action” to prevent a disaster in Iraq.

The exodus to urban centers like Mosul, Kirkuk and Basra could trigger “instability” because they are unprepared for such an influx, said Roger Guiu, director of the Iraq-based Social Inquiry research center. (I)