ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Farmers in central and southern Iraq are being forced to sell their cattle and abandon their land as Iraq’s water crisis turns the once fertile soil to desert sand. They complain the water resources ministry is not providing enough even to drink. “There is no water,” says Hassan Alewi, a farmer from Mijela, a rural area north of Baghdad. “Many people have abandoned their plots, selling their livestock. What is a farmer’s source of income? Of course, just farming. Look this area has turned into a desert.” The once mighty Tigris River has shrunk to a trickle, squeezed by drought, mismanagement, and by major dam projects upstream in neighboring Turkey. As a result, the irrigation channels carved into the land around Mijela have run dry, leaving the fields barren. Now even drinking water is scarce. “What is supplied by the water resources ministry now is not sufficient,” complains Razaq Mohammed, another local farmer. “There is not adequate drinking for the livestock, let alone the lands.” The UN envoy to Iraq has warned because of the fall in drinking water and the drying up of lands, 25 percent of residents in southern Iraq may have to abandon their homes. The Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture has accused the Ministry of Water Resources of exacerbating the crisis for the nation’s farmers by failing to adopt scientific methods, like drip irrigation. “The agriculture ministry is benefiting from water. The Ministry of Water Resources’ task is to distribute and supervise water,” said Hamid Adil Naif, spokesperson for the Iraqi agriculture ministry. “We set out a summer plan for 350,000 acres of farming land here. The low level of water did not meet the plan we had set. The water resources ministry said they did not have enough water in store for our plans,” he added. The level of water in Iraqi strategic water stores has fallen by eight billion cubic-meters amid a continued row over shared waters between Iraq, Turkey, and Iran and also because of climate change. The Ministry of Water Resources was forced to ration its stores. “On the basis of limits for the agricultural lands, it was decided in the summer months that water is released per demand for some kinds of products such as rice and corn. This is our current solution for the problem of lack of water,” said Zafir Abdulla, a water resources ministry official. Earlier this year, the Iraqi government banned the cultivation of water-intensive crops. Of 10 million acres of land, just 150,000 have been cultivated this summer. The rest has been left barren, driving farmers off the land and into the cities. On Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi went to Ankara for bilateral talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Shared water resources topped the agenda. Turkey is transforming its southeast with the massive Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) – the largest and costliest project in the country’s history. A cornerstone project of GAP is the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River. Turkey stopped filling the dam reservoir in early June at Iraq’s request.
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