Drought forces Iraqi farmers to leave their land

Iraqi wheat farmer Khamis Ahmad Abbas lost it all when his battle with drought forced him to abandon his land, pushing him into unemployment.

Experts have warned that record low rainfall, compounded by climate change, are threatening social and economic disaster in war-scarred Iraq.

"Growing wheat and barley is a gamble. It all depends on the rain," said the 42-year-old father of nine.

Unable to make ends meet, Abbas quit his land in the Plains of Nineveh, northeast of Mosul, part of the so-called Fertile Crescent where agriculture was born 12,000 years ago.

With temperatures soaring above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and little rain, Abbas's fields quickly dried up. Three months ago, he packed up his family -- two wives and nine children -- and moved to Mosul.

"Now I am unemployed," he told AFP, as he whiled away the time in a coffee shop in Iraq's second city.

Once the seat of the Islamic State group's self-styled "caliphate", Mosul is still rebuilding after the devastating 2017 battle which ousted the jihadists.

"Sometimes I get small jobs, just enough to feed my family," said Abbas bitterly, who longs for the old days when he harvested wheat and barley like his father and grandfather before him.

His plight is shared by many farmers in the Nineveh Plains.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 447 families who were forced from their land in Nineveh by IS and then returned to it after the jihadists' defeat were forced to leave again between June and July this year because of the drought.

"Nearly all, if not all, the families were displaced due to inability to feed their cattle," the IOM said.

'Most affected'

For centuries, the Nineveh Plains were the breadbasket of Iraq, with 6,000 square kilometres (2,300 square miles) of arable land, said agriculture ministry spokesman Hamid al-Nayef.

But this year, Nineveh province has been Iraq's "most affected" by drought and exceptionally high temperatures.

In 2020, 927,000 tonnes of wheat were harvested in Nineveh, making it a "self-sufficient" province, said Abdelwahab al-Jarjiri, who heads the local cereal authority.

This year production plunged to 89,000 tonnes because of the drought.

The effects of low rainfall have been exacerbated by falling water levels on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as a result of dam-building in neighbouring Turkey and Iran, said Samah Hadid of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

"Iraq is facing its worst drought in modern times. This is due to record low levels of rainfall, reductions in water flow from its neighbours -- which has primarily hit the Euphrates and Tigris rivers -- and there is no doubt climate change has contributed to this crisis," she said.

"Far from being a problem in the distant future, climate change is already taking effect in the region and we see this clearly in parts of Iraq."

Displacement and instability

The severity of the drought has forced many farming families to leave their land and seek a living in urban areas.

Akram Yassin, 28, is one of those considering such a move.

He has already sold some of his 500 sheep and some land just "to survive", he said.

"I might have to change careers, my financial losses are more than my gains," he added.

In October, UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), called for "urgent action" to avert a disaster in Iraq.

Before that in August, 13 aid organisations, including the NRC, warned that seven million people in Iraq risk losing access to water, forcing more from their homes.