Drought Forces Iraqi Farmers to Abandon Their Lands

Drought Forces Iraqi Farmers to Abandon Their Lands

Iraqi farmers in the northern Plains of Nineveh, once the breadbasket of Iraq, are abandoning their land pushed out by record low rainfall, drought and climate change Zaid AL-OBEIDI AFP

Iraqi wheat farmer Khamis Ahmad Abbas lost it all when his battle with drought forced him to abandon his land, pushing him into unemployment.

Experts have warned that record low rainfall, compounded by climate change, are threatening social and economic disaster in Iraq.

"Growing wheat and barley is a gamble. It all depends on the rain," said the 42-year-old father of nine, AFP reported.

Unable to make ends meet, Abbas quit his land in the Plains of Nineveh, northeast of Mosul, part of the so-called Fertile Crescent where agriculture was born 12,000 years ago.

With temperatures soaring above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and little rain, Abbas's fields quickly dried up.

Three months ago, he packed up his family -- two wives and nine children -- and moved to Mosul.

"Now I am unemployed," he told AFP, as he whiled away the time in a coffee shop in Iraq's second city.

"Sometimes I get small jobs, just enough to feed my family," said Abbas bitterly, who longs for the old days when he harvested wheat and barley