A massive dust storm cloud rolls over Al Asad, Iraq, just before nightfall on April 27, 2005. DoD photo by Corporal Alicia M. Garcia, U.S. Marine Corps.

By Khalid al-Ansary and Serena Chaudhry; additional reporting by Aref Mohammed in Basra and Khalid Farhan in Najaf; editing by Alistair Lyon and Janet Lawrence)
Sun Nov 14, 2010 8:22am EST BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Frequent dust storms and scarce rains are stifling Iraq’s efforts to revive a farming sector hit by decades of war, sanctions and isolation. Wheat and rice production has suffered from a severe drought in the past two years, due in part to rising temperatures, along with a dearth of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The U.N. Inter-Agency Information and Analysis Unit (IAU) says water levels in the two rivers — Iraq’s main water sources — have dropped to less than a third of normal capacity. “The tendency of rainfall in general is continuously declining. The same for temperature … you can see there is a rise,” said Deputy Environment Minister Kamal Hussein Latif. Farmers like Akram Mousa now face a struggle to keep their land cultivatable in the once fertile country watered by rivers that nurtured Mesopotamia’s ancient civilizations. “The temperature rise has deformed our crops. They either don’t grow properly or wither. It has made me abandon half my farms,” said the 65-year-old who owns seven farms of tomato, cucumber and melon in Zubair, in the southern province of Basra. … As temperatures creep higher and water levels remain low, desertification is swallowing arable land and hurting crop yields. Mousa said fertile land in the region where he farms had shrunk considerably in his 35 years of cultivating. In October, the IAU reported a drop in crop cover on almost 40 percent of farmland, especially in the north, in 2007-09. … Desertification and soil erosion, due partly to climate change and partly to mismanagement, are blamed for the dust storms that have multiplied in recent years, disrupting life in Baghdad and posing health risks for its 7 million people. Winds blow the dust, mostly from the western desert and north, to the capital, said Amer Shaker Hammadi, deputy head of an Agriculture Ministry committee on combating desertification. Baghdad endured 122 dust storms in 2008 and 82 in 2009, up from only three or four a year recorded in the 1970s, Latif said. In the former era, the choking tempests lasted no more than 12 hours. Now they can envelop the city for up to 36 hours. …

Climate change worsens plight of Iraqi farmers