CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — International donors who want to ad-dress Iraq’s deepening food insecurity must help farmers salvage next year’s wheat harvest as well as feed displaced people, says the United Nations.
Cyril Ferrand, who co-ordinates efforts for the UN’s World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organization in Iraq, said the prospect is not starvation tomorrow but rather a drastic drop in food production that would hit Iraq hard in next summer’s harvest season and beyond.
He said the aid community is “racing against time” as two critical periods overlap: the winter months and the end of the wheat planting season.
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Iraq relied on imports to cover half its wheat demand, even before the Islamic State advance. The FAO estimates the country imported 2.7 million tonnes of wheat from July 2013 to June 2014.
The government bought 3.4 million tonnes of wheat from farmers in the last harvest before the Islamic State offensive, but 17 percent of that amount is now in Islamic State-controlled silos, according to the FAO.
The UN says 2.8 million people need food assistance before the end of April. More than half of them are displaced.
Ferrand said the WFP needs $70 million to keep food aid flowing, while the FAO needs $38.5 million to deliver seeds and fertilizers to farmers before the end of the wheat planting season next month.
Islamic State militants drove hundreds of thousands of farming families off their fertile farmland and into camps in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
“A large number of farmers have fled their fields … but we must make sure that those who remained and can access their land are able to plant,” said Ferrand.
He said a recent survey in a government-controlled part of Nineveh province found that farmers face an income gap, either because they have unsold wheat or because they were not paid for wheat delivered to state silos before the militant offensive.
“It’s difficult for donors at the moment to make a decision,” Ferrand said. “You need to save lives for winter and we are telling them the impact will be in June.”
