Today there is no doubt that the system is an ever growing burden on the Iraqi government. As an article by news agency AFP noted: “a report by the International Monetary Fund in February 2010 described the system as ‘an inefficient generalised benefit that distorts private sector activity’."
The ration card system now serves double the amount of Iraqis it did when it was first introduced and that number is expected to increase by 800,000 annually simply because of population growth. All of which requires huge financial and human resources – resources that are lacking partially because of corruption within the relevant government departments that leads to waste - and partially because the Iraqi government simply doesn’t have the means to finance the scheme. According to the United Nations, the ration card funding accounts for about 7 percent of the federal budget.
The current Iraqi government has already said that it inherited the system from the former regime and that it could see no logical reason for keeping it – especially since international sanctions on Iraq were abolished some time ago. Scrapping the system would help move the Iraq towards becoming a real market economy and would make Iraqi consumers less dependent, they said.
However there are plenty of things that have made cancelling the ration card system very difficult. Certainly after the 2003 US-led invasion, as the security situation in Iraq deteriorated, there was more of a need for some sort of social welfare programme to protect Iraq’s vulnerable. The government is also well aware of the political significance of the ration card; they know only too well that the Iraqi people now see it as a basic right, no matter whether or not they actually still need the staples provided by the system.
So in many ways perhaps it’s no surprise that this latest attempt to scrap the ration card system failed. After all, this is just one in a long line of attempts to reform or adjust the scheme.
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