On Friday, the New York Times reported that Iraq’s date production, has fallen to half of what it was in the 1980s, when the country was the world’s leading date producer. “Date palms have been left to die for lack of water, and fungi and pests have ruined thousands of tons of fruit because the country has only three crop-dusting airplanes and three qualified pilots. American military approval is still needed to fly.”
The Iraqi government says it cannot spare any oil income to save the agricultural sector.
If, for thousands of years, Iraq, “the Fertile Crescent”, had a decent agricultural sector, and until the 1980s, also a stable manufacturing sector, its economy is now about only one commodity: oil. According to a senior Iraqi economist quoted in the article, 95% of the government’s revenue now comes from oil. It isn’t only the war’s destruction that threatens the Iraqi date crop. Even under the best of circumstances, countries with a heavy extractive sector have to work especially hard to sustain their agricultural or manufacturing sector in the face of the so-called Dutch disease, which vastly inflates the value of the resource country’s currency.
This means that a country’s other exports become too expensive to compete internationally and the economy withers. The country becomes totally dependent on its oil or gas. And extraction sectors bring in far fewer jobs than is commonly thought, leaving a lot of unemployed, bored, angry and restive people.
When you think of what the Dutch disease done to large sections of the Middle East, Nigeria, Gabon, Angola, and many other countries, you can see why this bodes very, very ill for Iraq in the long run. It would be smart for USAID or another American agency to start focusing on helping Iraq with more than oil and peace.
