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Islamic State Militants Grab New Weapon - Iraqi Wheat
by Reuters
After seizing five oil fields and Iraq's biggest dam, Sunni militants
bent on creating an Islamic empire in the Middle East now control yet
another powerful economic weapon - wheat supplies.
Fighters from the Islamic State have overrun large areas in five of
Iraq's most fertile provinces, where the United Nations food agency
says around 40 percent of its wheat is grown.
Now they're helping themselves to grain stored in government silos,
milling it and distributing the flour on the local market, an Iraqi
official told Reuters. The Islamic State has even tried to sell
smuggled wheat back to the government to finance a war effort marked by
extreme violence and brutality.
International officials are drawing uneasy comparisons with the days of
hardship under dictator Saddam Hussein, when Western sanctions led to
serious shortages in the 1990s.
"Now is the worst time for food insecurity since the sanctions and
things are getting worse," said Fadel El-Zubi, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative for Iraq.
While Iraq faces no immediate food shortages, the longer term outlook
is deeply uncertain.
Hassan Nusayif al-Tamimi, head of an independent nationwide union of
farmers' cooperatives, said the militants were intimidating any
producers who tried to resist.
"They are destroying crops and produce, and this is creating friction
with the farmers. They are placing farmers under a lot of pressure so
that they can take their grain," he said, adding that farmers had
reported fighters were also wrecking wells.
Many farmers have joined the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have
fled the Arab and foreign fighters' advance. Those who remain have yet
to be paid for the last crop, meaning they have no money to buy seed,
fuel and fertilizers to plant the next.
''
T''he statistics following the jihadists' lightning advance across
northern Iraq in June are grim both for the government in Baghdad and a
population that needs reliable food supplies.
Iraq's trade ministry says 1.1 million tons of wheat it bought from
farmers this harvest season is in silos in the five provinces. This
represents nearly 20 percent of annual Iraqi consumption which the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) puts at around 6.5 million tons,
roughly half of which is imported.
Amidst the chaos of northern Iraq, it remains unclear exactly how much
wheat has fallen into rebel hands, as the government still controls
parts of the provinces.
However, a source at the Agriculture Ministry confirmed the size of the
problem. About 30 percent of Iraq's entire farm production, including
the wheat crop, is at risk, the source said, requesting anonymity.
Jihadi Business Dealings
The Islamic State already has extensive business dealings. It is
selling crude oil and gasoline both in Iraq and Syria, where it is
fighting President Bashar al-Assad's forces to create a cross-border
caliphate.
So far, it has largely used energy and food resources under its control
as a fund raiser rather than an instrument of siege, selling instead of
withholding them.
A senior Iraqi government official told Reuters that the militants had
seized wheat in recent weeks from government silos in the provinces of
Nineveh and Anbar, which both border Syria.
These included 40,000-50,000 tons taken in Tal Afar and another Nineveh
town, Sinjar, where tens of thousands of local people from the Yazidi
religious minority have fled the militant onslaught to a nearby
mountain range.
Hassan Ibrahim, director general of the Grain Board of Iraq, said the
Islamic State had tried to sell wheat stolen from Nineveh back to the
government via middle men in other provinces.
"For this reason I stopped purchasing wheat from farmers last
Thursday," said Ibrahim, whose Trade Ministry body is responsible for
procuring wheat internationally and from local producers.
Bread prices are stable in Baghdad due to imports and crops in areas
still under government control. In Baghdad and nine other southern
provinces, the Trade Ministry has bought nearly 1.4 million tons from
farmers this season.
It is not clear whether the government's import needs will rise
dramatically, given that it will probably not try to supply areas no
longer under its control.
Unpaid Farmers
Iraq's wheat harvest began in May, the month before the Islamists and
their allies launched their assault, taking the cities of Mosul and
Tikrit in days when resistance from thousands of U.S.-trained
government soldiers collapsed.
The harvest begins in the south and moves north, meaning that farmers
began delivering wheat to government silos in rural areas around Mosul
in early June, less than two weeks before militants stormed the city.
Zubi said the government usually pays the producers two months in
arrears. Therefore an estimated 400,000 farmers are living under the
militants with no hope of being paid for the wheat they delivered
before the offensive. "No farmer received his money," he said, meaning
they will not be able to start planting in the seeding season that
begins as soon as next month in some areas. "This is their sole
income."
The FAO is urgently working to get 3,000 tons of wheat seed to the
farmers for planting, he said, though this effort faces major problems
due to the security situation. Seed deliveries are vital for ensuring
that fellow U.N. agencies such as the World Food Program, which are
already helping hundreds of thousands, are not saddled with feeding yet
more Iraqis.
John Schnittker, a former USDA economist who advised the Trade Ministry
for three years before USDA pulled its staff out of Baghdad in 2012,
said a number of factors would "severely test" the ability of farmers
in northern Iraq to grow their wheat crops to be harvested next year.
These included threats to irrigation water due to the militants'
control of the Mosul dam, the government's inability to get fertilizer
and fuel to farmers in areas under the Islamic State, and the fact that
many producers fled their homes.
He expected a "lower planted area and lower yields" for the 2014-2015
harvest. "It's very likely to be disrupted because of the conflict."
Meanwhile, the "public distribution system" - the government's means of
supplying subsidized flour and other goods such as vegetable oil, sugar
and rice - has broken down in militant-held areas.
Although the system is corrupt and wasteful, impoverished Iraqis depend
on it. Schnittker said its breakdown poses a "huge hardship" to
northern Iraq's rural population and would eventually push more people
into refugee status.
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References
1. http://www.voanews.com/content/reu-islamic-state-militants-new-weapon-iraqi-wheat/2412366.html