Focus on food self-sufficiency in north

For the 150 families living in the farming village of Sisawa in the northern governorate of Arbil, 1996 was a turning point. "Before then, my family alone produced 150 tons of rice a year, all of which we sold," elderly headman Anwar Haji Jafar told IRIN in Sisawa. "After 1996, we stopped planting it altogether. Life got a lot harder for us," he added. You hear similar stories in Shinawa, five km up the road towards the mountain town of Shaqlawa in Arbil. Villagers continue to plant wheat, barley and chickpeas in the fields on either side of the main road, but sell their crops for only a fraction of what they used to. Like Haji Jafar, they say they have abandoned growing rice. "You can buy it easily in the market for only a fraction of what it costs to grow," Ahmed Abdullah told IRIN. "We used to produce in bulk. Now we're basically market gardeners, selling tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers." What changed life for villagers in this fertile valley north of the still snow-covered Sefin mountain was rations. Since the introduction of the Oil-for-Food programme in 1996, all Iraqis have been provided free of charge each month with basic food items - flour, lentils, chickpeas, cooking oil and sugar. For many of the hundreds of thousands of Kurds evicted from their land by 30 years of war with the Iraqi Baath party and conflict between the two main Kurdish groups, rations continue to be vital for survival. "This food has been a tremendous help to the Kurdish people, and the programme was among the best-organised things the United Nations did," Shafiq Azaz, minister of humanitarian affairs in the Kurdistan Democratic Party-controlled half of northern Iraq told IRIN. "There were some hiccups, occasional shortages, but that was the fault of Baghdad, not the World Food Programme which supervised distribution." Like many other Kurdish officials, though, he is quick to point out the negative effects of the ration programme. "Let's not forget that there was a time when the Kurdish area was Iraq's breadbasket, producing enough to export," he said. "We tried again and again to persuade the UN authorities to make use of local crops, rather than importing everything. But we failed, and as a result a lot of recently returned villagers were bankrupted and forced to go back to the towns." There are plenty of officials far more vehement than Azaz. The high commissioner for internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees in the northernmost Dahuk province, Musa Ali Bakir, can barely contain his fury at the effects of the rations programme. "When Saddam vaporized 950 of the 1,100 villages in this province, and forced the villagers into the collective towns, his aim was to remove the last vestiges of their autonomy, to make them entirely dependent on the state for survival," he argued. "The ration cards have only deepened that dependence, and should be scrapped immediately." He believes that the only way to heal what he calls "Kurdish society's deep wound" is to help uprooted farmers return to their former productive live. He also claimed that the food distribution network is, because of its centralization, an obstacle for farmers who want to return. Villagers returning to the countryside, he said, were still forced to return to the city monthly to pick up their rations. However, the tent dwellers in a field on the outskirts of Kirkuk said it only took a week for them to transfer their ration card from Baziyan, in Sulaymaniyah governorate. Villagers in Sisawa and Shinawa say they obtain their rations from private vendors in Harir, barely 15 km away. In the dreary collective town of Basirma, though, where the inhabitants of Sisawa and Shinawa were transferred in 1988, several men imply that the ongoing rations scheme may be one reason they have not yet returned. "We keep in close contact with former neighbours who have returned," Hedar Ahmad, who used to live in Sisawa, told IRIN. "We know that they're struggling to make ends meet." "I dream of leaving this place and going back to the village," Hasan Hamed Amin, also of Sisawa, told IRIN. "But there's a limited market for vegetables, and that's pretty much all they're producing now." With the ration programme looking likely to end in its present form this June, Kurdish administrators are already hard at work dreaming up alternatives. "You cannot just scrap the scheme altogether, but it is important to encourage a return to self-sufficiency," argued Ahmad Bamarni, an engineer who heads reconstruction projects in Dahuk governorate. "One way that could be done is to provide returning villagers with rations only for the first year after their return." But that would not solve the problem of local farmers' shrinking markets. For Shafiq Azaz, one possible answer lies in swapping food rations for money. "That would break down the near monopoly of imported food," he argued. "But other incentives are required to persuade farmers to begin growing staple crops again." Whatever happens, the rejigging of the ration system is likely to be stormy. While few doubt the necessity of maintaining support for the displaced inhabitants of collective towns, IDPs are not the only ones who insist rations are essential to their survival. Half hidden against yellow-brown cliffs, the small and obviously poor village of Bawian sits 200 metres above Sisawa plain. Reduced to rubble in 1988, it now houses only 40 families, less than a third of the previous figure. Villagers here say the land they own has only ever been enough to feed themselves, and the only money they make comes from selling the sheep and goats that graze on the slopes above the houses. "Only the Aghas (tribal clan) have ever made money from land in this region," one villager, Hasan Taa, told IRIN.