The disease has been spreading among the farmers for almost a month.
Abbas Baiz, a farmer whose 40 dunams of wheat have fallen to the affliction they refer to as a “curse”, said that they were anticipating to produce over 300 tons of wheat this year, but now they expect less than 40 tons and have incurred a loss of approximately 450 million Iraqi dinars.
“First the disease was in the stems of the wheat, then it gradually spread to the leaves and quickly covered the whole wheat and they dried up completely,” Baiz told Rudaw’s Abubakir Ismael on Wednesday.
Mustafa Mohammed, another affected farmer, said that the majority of their wheat has been infected and they now have no choice but to plow the land.
Rust impacts the aerial parts of plants, and is triggered by factors such as heavy rainfall, severe cold, premature plowing, and the type of seeds used.
Ghazi Fatah, the head of plant protection at Raparin’s agriculture directorate, stated that a significant portion of the wheat crops which were affected by the disease are those that were planted before the sporadic rains.
Around 180,000 dunams of land are cultivated with wheat in Raparin, producing over 108,000 tons of wheat, according to data from the agriculture directorate.
