NGO helps to rebuild bee-keeping business in north

The Kurds like to say that their only friends are the mountains. Bee-keeper Abdulrahman Senduri thinks the same could be said about honey bees. "Banging a piece of metal next to a hive is enough to get the bees to fly off into the hills," he told IRIN in Dahuk, northern Iraq. "So you can only imagine what the state of the bee population here was in 1991, when Saddam put down the Kurdish rebellion. The hives were all burned or smashed, and the sky was black with bees, fleeing north towards Turkey." A part of rural life in the northern Iraqi mountains for thousands of years, honey production had been no less devastated by the Baathist campaigns of 1976 and 1988. On those occasions, farmers had done their best to start up again. After 1991, though, with the Kurdish region on the brink of starvation, they had more pressing concerns. In Dahuk governorate, the job of rebuilding the industry fell largely to one small American non-governmental organisation (NGO), Concern4Kids (C4K), whose country director Robert Anderson has been based there since 1991. "The idea came to us as we were helping in the reconstruction of villages in the Matin mountains, just south of the Turkish border," he told IRIN. "Villagers were happy to be back, but they were seriously struggling. Their diet was poor and the Kurdish authorities didn't have money to provide basic materials for their schools." Brought up on a hive-filled farm in Georgia, USA, Anderson immediately sensed the income-generating possibilities in honey production. He had heard of the concept of "pass on the gift", where farmers give other families a small percentage of lambs or calves born to their stock. Why not do the same with hives, which can produce three or four new queens per season if well kept? The question was, where to find bees to get the project started, C4K began by importing queens from Europe, but the going was painfully slow. Then, one day in 1993, the news broke that a Turkish Kurdish smuggler had come to town. "The man had a mule with two hives full of bees slung over the saddle-bags," remembers Anderson. "He was very poor, and wanted me to buy them for US $15. We offered a lot more." The smuggler then said he had 48 more hives back home in Turkey. Two by two, he brought them all, braving minefields along the border. With bees aplenty, C4K turned its attention to the construction of hives, and training. "Until 1991, most of us used hives made from a tree trunk, hollowed out and blocked at one end," said Saleh Younes, who has been producing honey in the village of Bade just north of Dahuk since the 1960s. "The square box hives Robert made produce better quality honey and are more easily reusable." Hives are now built by carpenters in Dahuk, working on imported models shown them by C4K a decade ago. Training returned villagers in bee-keeping techniques was a longer process. "Our aim at the beginning was to provide only the poorest of families with hives," Anderson explained. "Many of these people had had no experience of bees before, and needed to be taught." That job fell to men like Abdulrahman Senduri, who studied agriculture in Baghdad in the early 1970s. Drafted in by C4K, he began touring villages north of Dahuk, teaching farmers how to divide swarms, and recognize the first signs of the parasites that can decimate a hive. "Bee-keeping is not a job for fools, but these villagers were eager to learn," Senduri said. "The biggest battle I had was persuading them not to feed the bees year round on sugar. It's easy, but it makes the bees lazy, and the honey they produce is no good." You can see what he means in the market in Dahuk. Shopkeeper Khidir Hamed lifts up two jars of honey. "This stuff is imported from Iran, and sells at $5 a kilo," he said. The honey is dark, with a sediment of eggs and larvae. The jar of locally produced honey costs $9, but looks and tastes better. "It's made from the pollen of almond flowers," Hamed said. "It's taken my customers time to accept the higher price, but more of them are now buying this than the imported stuff." C4K was forced to leave Dahuk for a year in 1996 when Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani invited the Iraqi army in to fight off forces from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. They returned to find many of their hives had been stolen and sold by a former local employee. Despite such setbacks, honey production is once again widespread throughout the region. There are C4K hives as far away as Mergesur, four hours by road from Dahuk. Further to the west, other groups like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have also sponsored honey production. "We bought 40 hives from them in 1996, Hasan Hamed Amin, a farmer in Shinawa village north of Arbil, told IRIN. "We now have 300, and honey has become our surest way of making money." Described by Senduri as "the champion of Kurdistan's honey bees", Robert Anderson has wider ambitions. "The new natural honey is well on the way to conquering the local market," he said. "Now is the time to begin exporting it. First stop Kuwait and Saudi Arabia."