6 years after invasion, Ninewa farmers grumbling

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: Farmers in the province of Ninewa expressed discontent over their “deteriorating” conditions now that the agricultural sector in the city grew “seriously” ill six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Agricultural conditions in Ninewa in general and our al-Qiyara district in particular, is very bad for six years now. Drought hit our areas and, adding insult to injury, the state has neglected the agricultural during that time,” Harb al-Yaseen, an owner of a field in al-Qiyara, told IraqiNews.com news agency. “Seeds are little, no plowing machines or artesian wells and the financial support by agricultural banks is absent,” Yaseen complained. Salem Aziz, another farmer in al-Qiyara, 60 km south of Mosul city, was not happy either. “For five years now there is zero support for the wheat and barley crops and worse the prices of fuel used in plowing, seeding and harvesting have skyrocketed,” Aziz said. Ninewa, known with the soubriquet ‘Iraq’s bread basket’, is one of the most important Iraqi provinces producing wheat and barley, yielding more than half of Iraq’s production of these two crops in addition to other ones like olives, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and fruits. Jassem Mohammed Taha, a farmer from the district of Sinjar, 120 km west of Mosul, said farmers in his area were suffering from lack of rainwater and negligence of agriculture. “Most farmers have left the countryside and headed for the cities in search of other sources of income,” said Taha. Rasheed Ghanim, a 37-year-old farmer from Talkeef, 17 km north of Mosul, said he has left farming “because we have been groaning under heavy losses during the past years”. “In the past, we used to spend about one million Iraqi dinars during the season and obtain 10-15 million dinars, but during the recent years we could not even receive back what we have spent,” Ghanim told IraqiNews.com. “In the end, I bought a car and worked as a cab driver and headed for Mosul for chances better than those in Talkeef,” he added. AmR (S)/SR 3