MISHKHAB – Associated Press Iraq has banned its farmers from planting summer crops this year as the country grapples with a crippling water shortage that shows few signs of abating.
Citing high temperatures and insufficient rains, Dhafer Abdalla, an adviser to Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources, told The Associated Press that the country has only enough water to irrigate half its farmland this summer.
But farmers fault the government for failing to modernize how it manages water and irrigation, and they blame neighboring Turkey for stopping up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers behind dams it wants to keep building.
Water levels across these two vital rivers – which together give Iraq its ancient name, Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers – fell by over 60 percent in two decades, according to a 2012 report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Iraq’s Natural Resources Ministry protests it does not have the budget to do that.
In one instance, they forced the closure of a levee along a branch of the Euphrates River to let the water levels rise for irrigation.
But Agriculture Ministry spokesman Hameed al-Naief told the AP that only 5,000 dunams (1,236 acres) of irrigated land could be allocated to the crop this summer, less than 3 percent of the area permitted last year.
About 70 percent of Iraq’s water supplies flow in from upstream countries.
Iraq’s Water Resources Ministry says it has enough water behind the Mosul Dam to guarantee adequate flow for a year, but experts say the Ilisu could take up to three years to fill, depending on rains.
The last moratorium on farming rice came in 2009, but that year farmers were permitted to grow other crops to shore up their income.