NAJAF: After Iraqi farmer Muntazer al-Joufi saw his once-luxurious rice fields dwindle in recent years due to relentless drought, he fought back with harder seeds and water-saving irrigation techniques.
“This is the first time we are using modern techniques that use less water” to grow rice, said Joufi, 40, as he surveyed his land in central Najaf province.
“It’s a huge difference” compared to flooding the field, Joufi added, referring to the traditional method in which the land must remain submerged all summer.
But four consecutive years of drought and declining rainfall have throttled rice production in Iraq, which is still recovering from years of war and chaos and where rice and bread are staples of the diet.
The United Nations says Iraq is one of the five most climate-vulnerable countries in the world.
Joufi is among the farmers receiving support from the Ministry of Agriculture, whose experts are developing innovative methods to save Iraq’s rice production.
Their work involves pairing hardy rice seeds with modern irrigation systems to replace the flooding method in a country hit by water shortages, heat waves and dwindling rivers.
Under the scorching Iraqi sun, with temperatures rising to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), Joufi trudged across a muddy field, pausing to tend to malfunctioning sprinklers spread over his one hectare (2.5 acre) of land.
Growing rice in Iraq typically requires 10 to 12 billion cubic meters of water during a five-month growing season.
But experts say the new methods, using sprinklers and drip irrigation, use 70 percent less water than traditional flood practices, where workers had to ensure fields were completely covered with water.
Now, Joufi said, all it takes is “one person to turn on the sprinklers … and the water will reach every bit of ground.”
Experts from the Ministry of Agriculture say that during the years of drought, the area planted with rice has shrunk from more than 30,000 hectares to just 5,000.
“Because of the drought and lack of water, we have to use modern irrigation techniques and new seeds,” said Abdel Kazem Jawad Moussa, who leads a team of such experts.
They experimented with different types of sprinklers, drip irrigation and five different types of seeds that are drought tolerant and use less water in the hope of finding the best combination.
“We want to learn which seed genotypes respond well” to sprinkler irrigation instead of flooding, Moussa said.
Last year, Al-Ghari – a genotype derived from Iraq’s prized amber rice – and South Asian jasmine seeds produced good results when cultivated using small sprayers, so experts offered the combination to farmers like Joufi in the hope it would be the best.
“At the end of the season, we will come up with recommendations,” Moussa said, adding that he also hoped to introduce three new varieties of seeds with a shorter planting season next year.
In addition to the drought, authorities blame upstream dams built by Iraq’s powerful neighbors Iran and Turkey for a dramatic drop in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia.
Water shortages have forced many farmers to leave their lands, and authorities have drastically reduced farming activities to ensure enough drinking water for Iraq’s 43 million people.
In 2022, authorities limited rice cultivation areas to 1,000 hectares in Najaf and the southern province of Diwaniyah, the heartland of amber rice cultivation.
Farmers in Diwaniyah recently protested, urging the government to allow them to farm their land after a two-year hiatus.
But despite heavy rains this winter that have helped alleviate water shortages, authorities have only allowed them to grow rice on 30 percent of their land.
“The last good year was 2020,” said farmer Fayez al-Yassiri in his field in Diwaniyah, where he hopes to grow amber and jasmine rice.
Iraq is the second-largest oil producer in the OPEC cartel, but despite having huge oil and gas reserves, it remains dependent on imports to meet its energy needs and faces chronic power outages.
Yassiri urged the authorities to help, specifically by providing electricity and pesticides to farmers. His cousin Bassem Yassiri was less promising. “The lack of water has ended agriculture in this region,” he said.
