Farmers in north trained on new methods

Amin Tahar, Sala Ahmed and Musa Yousef, all three farmers from the village of Besifki near the northern Iraqi city of Dahuk, stand on a narrow beaten mud track between two orchards admiring the land. “We planted all these peach trees at the same time, two springs ago,” farmer Yousef, told IRIN, whose village produces 1,000 mt of apples, peaches and grapes every season. “Already you can tell the difference.” He points to his right, where the rectangle of a hundred saplings grows up straight and healthy. On the left, several of the trees are showing signs of disease, the leaves curled around little colonies of insects. “The tall ones are the trees we had shipped in from Zakho Small Village Project’s nurseries up in Dereluk,” Yousef said, having completed a sustainable agriculture course in 2002. A local NGO working in coordination with Caritas, ZSVP has been running a variety of farming projects across northern Iraq since it was set up in 1992. “We began with reconstruction work in the north of Dahuk governorate in the early 1990s,” ZSVP’s Dahuk program manager Abid Ali Hasan told IRIN in Dahuk. “The sustainable development project was set up in 1997.” An agricultural engineer by training, Hasan sees his job as an attempt to counterbalance the bad farming habits learned during the period of the Baathist rule, when Iraqi agriculture was massively subsidised. “If anything, the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food programme only made things worse,” he added. “The import of vast amounts of pesticide and fertilizer encouraged farmers to use both indiscriminately, damaging not only the environment but sometimes even their health in the process.” Tahar and Yousef were two of 60 farmers in the Mangish district of Dahuk governorate brought in to Mangish to receive training. By bringing together farmers from a large number of villages, Hasan hoped, individuals would be able to return home and disseminate their knowledge more widely. “They taught us new methods for grafting fruit trees and told us about more resistant varieties,” explained Amin Tahar. “Also some things that seem obvious now, like how to store fertilizer safely, so it won’t affect your family.” “The courses depended on the type of farming done in a particular district,” Hasan explained. “Mangish is one of the heartlands of fruit production. Elsewhere, we were dealing with grain farmers.” The idea of the courses came to him in 1996 on a visit to Syria: “In Iraqi Kurdistan, your average donem [quarter hectare] yields 300 kilograms of wheat. Over there development of local strains and better ploughing techniques had significantly increased yields.” The chairman of the agricultural cooperative in Mangish, Abdulrahman Abdullah, is convinced ZSVP’s intervention was helpful. “It’s just a pity they’ve been unable to set up more courses for us,” he told IRIN. “Farmers around here still have a great deal to learn.” The farmers up in Besifki agree, up to a point. It is equally clear that it will take more than a few courses to break the habits of a subsidised lifetime. “Fifteen years ago, the price of a bag of fertilizer was a tenth of what it is now,” complained Yousef. “We’ve been able to buy four bags of pesticide, but we need at least 20.” “50,” added Tahar. The farmers say they need to add value to what they produce. “What we really need is for the government to build us a canning factory,” Tahar said. “At the moment we’re obliged to sell our produce on a saturated market at low prices. With the factory, we could wait and make more.” In his office in Dahuk, Abid Ali Hasan sighed. “It is true that the greatest problem facing our farmers is the lack of a market,” he said. “But what can one NGO do about that?”