Earth Equity News

Drought Threatens Iraq's Crops and Water Supply. By Sally Buzbee, AP, July 10, 2008. "It's been a year of drought and sand storms across Iraq -- a dry spell that has devastated the country's crucial wheat crop and created new worries about the safety of drinking water. U.S. officials warn that Iraq will have to increase wheat imports sharply this winter to make up for the lost crop -- a sobering proposition with world food prices high and some internal refugees already struggling to afford food. 'Planting ... is totally destroyed,' said Daham Mohammed Salim, 40, who farms 120 acres in the al-Jazeera area near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad... The Tikrit area, where Saddam Hussein was born, normally is flush with green meadows in the spring and early summer -- but this year has only thistles... The dry weather has hurt areas from Kurdistan's wheat fields in northern Iraq to pomegranate orchards, orange groves and wheat fields just north of Baghdad. In the capital, the Tigris river is at its lowest level since 2001, with yards of reeds exposed on each bank. Some irrigation canals to the north in Diyala province -- the country's most important bread basket -- are bone dry."