BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Iraqi government has decided to compensate Kurdish farmers by only 17 percent in 2017 while farmers in the rest of the country will benefit from an 80 percent compensation system, an Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker said Monday. Lawmaker Ashwaq Jaf said that the bulk of the earmarked compensation package, worth an estimated 900 billion dinars (about $700 million), will go to help farmers outside the Kurdistan Region while the Kurdish farmers are still expecting to receive compensation for previous years, the MP added. “This is a great injustice against the farmers in Kurdistan Region. The Kurdish farmers are entitled to the composition like other framers elsewhere in Iraq and it is the obligation of the central government in Baghdad to distribute the compensation equally,” Jaf told Rudaw. Jaf said Kurdish farmers have not been fully compensated for the past three years, a growing debt which now amounts to over 902 billion dinars. “We have asked the other Iraqi factions including the National Coalition and its leader Ammar Hakeem to put pressure on (Prime Minister Haider al-) Abadi to compensate Kurdish farmers justly. Farmers should not be part of the ongoing dispute between Baghdad and Erbil,” she added. The Kurdish ministry of agriculture says wheat farmers in the Kurdistan Region will likely to face hard-hitting regulations in Baghdad this year when selling their crop. Iraq’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced, in order to buy Kurdish farmers wheat crop in the future, the farmers will need to give detailed and documented information about how and where they have produced their goods. Baghdad has raised doubts over the speedy increase of wheat production in the Kurdish controlled territories of Iraq and accused ministry of agriculture in Erbil of selling exported wheat crop from other Kurdish areas in Syria, Turkey and Iran as their own harvest, something Kurdish authorities have strongly denied. Kurdish wheat crop increased by 18 percent in 2015 while Iraq’s total production fell nearly 10 percent, according to official data. The recent row between Erbil and Baghdad over the size of the total production of wheat in Kurdistan Region has primarily troubled farmers in the Kurdish areas who have nowhere to store their crop while the Iraqi government refuses to buy their wheat, contrary to previous agreements, Kurds say. Kurdish authorities have warned that some 378,000 tons of wheat will be eventually wasted if the central government continues to refuse purchasing Kurdish crop.
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