Agriculture Minister Mahdi al-Qaisi told Al-Monitor, “One of the possible solutions to save agriculture is foreign investment because they bring large amounts of money into the country, in addition to modern equipment for agriculture and irrigation." He saw licensing rounds as a means to do this.
He said, “One of the obstacles impeding investment at the moment is the scarcity of water in the Euphrates, which will also affect the Tigris River after Turkey establishes the Ilisu Dam.” He also said, “The agricultural sector’s contribution to the GDP has fallen in recent years from 11% to 7%.”
Meanwhile, farmers expressed concerns about becoming unemployed if international investment companies come into Iraq and said they also feared that their crop production would not be able to compete with that of investment companies.
Jalil Abed, a farmer from Wasit province, in eastern Iraq, told Al-Monitor, “We refuse to lease or sell our land to foreign companies because we could easily become unemployed overnight. We could, however, sell our agricultural products to foreign companies if they commit to paying us and giving us modern machines for agriculture and irrigation.”
However, economist Salam Adel told Al-Monitor, “Organizing agricultural licensing rounds is difficult at the moment because the agricultural areas are located in heated areas where security is unstable, specifically in the provinces of Ninevah, Salahuddin, Anbar and Diyala,” pointing out that “the global agricultural companies are looking for stable regions, which are currently difficult to find in Iraq.”
He concluded, “The staff of foreign companies operating in Iraq may be exposed to extortion and kidnappings due to the proliferation of armed groups, and especially since they do not operate in one place, but in open lands that are difficult to secure.”
Finally, it seems that no one disagrees with the overall idea of agricultural licensing rounds. However, like any other project in Iraq, when it comes to implementation, it faces the lack of security that is a dead end for all projects in Iraq.
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