Multinational oil company Exxon Mobil now runs the West Qurna 1 oil field and the Russian firm Lukoil runs West Qurna 2. Other oil companies, like Shell, BP and the Italian oil company Eni, are also working in the area and very likely to buy up or lease more land for oil exploration in Basra.
Mohammed was lucky though. Many of the other farmers in the area only received a one-off payout, financial compensation for their land.
“What are we going to do afterwards though? The payout isn’t that much,” comments Khalaf Sharhan, another local farmer who is preparing to leave his land. “The whole region seems to be reserved for the oil men. If each piece of pipeline needs at least 150 meters of ground, as well as a few meters on either side, then where is the farm land for us?” Sharhan argues. In fact, the farmers that have been able to hang onto some of their land often find that it is not enough to earn them a decent living.
In reality nobody knows exactly how much land the oil work will consume. They will definitely encompass the areas north of Basra, like Qurna, Howeir and the area around Thaghar and Madinah. West of Basra, the affected areas include Safwan, Rafidiya, Raha and Zubair.
Recently a good harvest increased the farmers’ antipathy toward the oil companies that would occupy, or that are occupying, their arable land. North of Basra, the barley crops did particularly well this year. In the areas north of Basra not yet signed over to oil exploration, the local department of agriculture estimates that around 28,000 tonnes of barley were harvested. If these areas are signed over to the oil firms, that number is likely to halve.
And this may well happen, according to Abbas Nasser al-Fadhli, adviser to Basra’s local authorities on tribal affairs. “There is oil under about70 percent of Basra’s ground and the agricultural land definitely overlaps with the areas where oil companies want to work,” he explains.
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