Strategic wheat reserve in Iraq sufficient for 6 months
A worker helps an excavator to collect wheat grain at a silo in Mosul, Iraq. Photo: Reuters
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – The Iraqi Minister of Trade, Atheer Al-Ghurairy, stated on Thursday that the strategic reserve of wheat in Iraq is enough for six months, according to the official Iraqi News Agency (INA).
Al-Ghurairy expected that a year’s stock of wheat will be secured at the end of the buying season, INA mentioned.
The General Company for Grain Trading, which is the state company responsible for purchasing grain in Iraq, announced Tuesday it bought more than one million tons of locally-produced wheat from farmers in 13 governorates, according to Al-Iraqiya broadcasting television network.
The wheat-buying season in Iraq began in mid-April.
In an interview with Bloomberg last month, the director general of Iraq’s grain board, Haider Nouri, said that Iraq is expected to produce 3.5 million tons of wheat this year, compared to about 2.2 million tons produced last year.
The Iraqi government runs a food support program that includes distributing 4.6 million tons of wheat annually.
Last year, Iraq bought one million tons of wheat to compensate for the shortfall in production, which depends largely on rain and the flow of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
In recent years, the Iraqi government has been buying wheat from mainly three sources. These three sources are the United States, Australia, and Canada.