U.N. Developing Olive Groves and Mills in Drought-Prone Areas of Iraq

A restored irri­ga­tion project in Iraq has just been offi­cially launched by local author­i­ties and United Nations offi­cials from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Its recov­ery and reopen­ing will impact a large agri­cul­tural area near the Syrian bor­der. The announce­ment comes as an intense and pro­longed drought plagues large swaths of the coun­try, accel­er­at­ing deser­ti­fi­ca­tion and threat­en­ing crops.

The new project, largely financed by the European Union, was ini­tially launched by the north­ern gov­er­norate of Al-Jazīrah in 1990.

However, the infra­struc­ture was heav­ily dam­aged dur­ing the self-pro­claimed Islamic State (ISIS) occu­pa­tion, to the point that local farm­ers ceased oper­a­tions in an area already hit by the con­se­quences of cli­mate change.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the recov­ery project included the recon­struc­tion of the water pump­ing sta­tion at Tel Al-Hawa, and the rebuild­ing of 11 bridges, 17 power trans­mis­sion tow­ers and 21 water con­trol gates.

The mas­sive restora­tion required the clean­ing of irri­ga­tion canals from silt and debris engag­ing 1,250 house­holds through a cash-for-work scheme and pro­vid­ing spare parts to 150 lin­ear-move irri­ga­tion sys­tems.

Even though the most rel­e­vant por­tions of the Iraqi econ­omy are related to oil and gas, farm­ing rep­re­sents the third most rel­e­vant eco­nomic activ­ity.

It is believed that more than 200,000 peo­ple from the town of Rabia and the sur­round­ing areas will ben­e­fit from the resump­tion of agri­cul­tural activ­i­ties.

Local author­i­ties are strug­gling to main­tain water secu­rity for the pop­u­la­tion and farm­ing in large areas of the coun­try.

The World Bank esti­mates that more than 40 per­cent of the coun­try is cur­rently desert and sparsely pop­u­lated because of the harsh cli­matic con­di­tions, which include the wors­en­ing phe­nom­e­non of heat­waves and sand­storms.

Among the cur­rent chal­lenges, the bank’s experts cite the reduced avail­abil­ity of good qual­ity water due to the wide­spread salin­ity.

“Desertification and water scarcity due to river flow fluc­tu­a­tions ren­der Iraq vul­ner­a­ble to the adverse effects of cli­mate change,” World Bank offi­cials wrote.

Areas once known for their farm­ing activ­i­ties, such as the south­ern Iraq palm tree plan­ta­tions, have slowly lost land to deser­ti­fi­ca­tion and salin­iza­tion. The ongo­ing drought exac­er­bates the exist­ing fragility of the agri­cul­tural sec­tor.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Iraqi gov­ern­ment has recently opted to halve the amount of water that can be used for farm­ing activ­i­ties, a deci­sion due to the reduced amount of water flow­ing in from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

At the begin­ning of May, the Ministry of Agriculture warned that deser­ti­fi­ca­tion risk is now cov­er­ing 90 per­cent of the coun­try due to cli­mate change effects and the cur­rent dis­putes with Iran and Turkey about the use of com­mon water river resources.

According to Al-Monitor, the min­istry warned that the rate of deser­ti­fi­ca­tion is increas­ing with grow­ing con­se­quences for food secu­rity. A min­istry offi­cial told the mag­a­zine that mil­i­tary con­flicts, exces­sive use of water by farm­ers and cit­i­zens, drought and cli­mate change are the main dri­vers of the cur­rent cri­sis.

Since the 1950s, tem­per­a­tures in Iraq have steadily risen. According to the U.S.-based Tahir Institute for Middle East Policy, the fre­quency of heat­waves reach­ing 50 ºC or more is increas­ing and it is believed that sur­face tem­per­a­tures will rise by two or three degrees by the end of the cen­tury.

In this con­text, the gov­ern­ment is sup­port­ing the launch­ing of new farm­ing activ­i­ties by pri­vate entre­pre­neurs in chal­leng­ing areas.

With the ambi­tion of becom­ing the most rel­e­vant olive oil pro­ducer in the coun­try, Rasan Factory was launched in 2018 in the Kirkuk gov­er­norate near Halabja, more than 200 kilo­me­ters north of Baghdad.

“Since the begin­ning, we aimed not only at mak­ing excel­lent high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil but also to offer job oppor­tu­ni­ties and pro­mote busi­ness on a local and regional level,” Ahmad Ali Tamas, owner of the com­pany, told Olive Oil Times.

“Our coun­try used to have so many olive tree plan­ta­tions once, but there was no real cul­ture on how to man­age the trees and how to keep them healthy,” he added. ​“It was low-qual­ity pro­duc­tion which would have no place on the inter­na­tional mar­ket.”

According to the Iraqi olive oil pro­ducer, the price dynam­ics in the local mar­ket have changed so that it is now eas­ier for olive farm­ers to earn a suf­fi­cient income for their work.

“There has been a rel­e­vant shift in the way con­sumers approach qual­ity olive oils,” he said. ​“The pop­u­lar cul­ture once per­ceived them as specif­i­cally use­ful for med­i­cine or cos­met­ics.”

“Now, peo­ple are both more aware of the health pro­file of extra vir­gin olive oil and more inter­ested in using the higher qual­ity olive oil for cook­ing,” Tamas added.

One of the most rel­e­vant qual­i­ties of the olive trees for local farm­ers is related to the high resilience of most cul­ti­vars to drought and water deficits.

In the last few years, sev­eral inter­na­tion­ally-sup­ported pro­grams have been started in sev­eral areas of the coun­try in order to har­ness olive tree resilience.

Only a few months ago, the U.N. World Food Program par­tic­i­pated with local author­i­ties and the local asso­ci­a­tion of olive oil pro­duc­ers in the open­ing of a new state-of-the-art olive oil mill in Bashiqa, in north­ern Iraq.

The aim of the ini­tia­tive is to restore local olive pro­duc­tion, involve farm­ers in a project of social and eco­nomic devel­op­ment and con­nect olive oil pro­duc­tion to the local and inter­na­tional mar­kets.

Due to the work of sev­eral non­profit orga­ni­za­tions and the sup­port of local author­i­ties, the U.N. Development Program is behind olive devel­op­ment projects in the area of Haditha, one of the major cities of the gov­er­norate of Anbar, a largely desert area in the cen­tral-west­ern part of the coun­try.

The project began with recov­er­ing infra­struc­ture and land which had been dev­as­tated by the ISIS occu­pa­tion. In the last few months, more than 250 hectares lost to deser­ti­fi­ca­tion were con­verted to sus­tain­able farm­ing.

Besides olives, local farm­ers have been sup­ported with saplings from cucum­ber, pis­ta­chios, aloe vera and date palms.

Given the revived inter­est and abil­i­ties in olive oil pro­duc­tion, Iraq has recently opened nego­ti­a­tions with the International Olive Council to return to the coun­cil, a move that would greatly enhance the sec­tor’s expert train­ing and tech­nol­ogy exchange oppor­tu­ni­ties.

The local sce­nario might be extremely chal­leng­ing, but Tamas empha­sized how local farm­ers know that work­ing day by day in the right direc­tion will yield opti­mal results.

“Today, we pro­duce approx­i­mately 200,000 liters of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, but we intend to con­tinue the expan­sion of our pro­duc­tion as we are focused on involv­ing more farm­ing areas,” he con­cluded.

• Relief Web
• Al-Monitor
• International Olive Council