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The Iraq Salinity Project is an expansion of past work and earlier researches on salinity management in central and southern Iraq. The project was launched in December in 2010 bringing together agriculture experts from Iraq and international researchers from renowned agricultural institutions.

This project will produce options to control salinity in irrigated soils, improve livelihoods and agricultural productivity through an assessment of the current situation in five sampling irrigation projects which are: Dujaila, Mussaib, Abu-Khaseeb, Western Garraf and Al-Nassiriah. The assessment will provide baseline information to set the ground for future investment opportunities in Iraq.

Research, which is carried out in three scales: regional, irrigation and farm, looks at: distribution of salt-affected land in Iraq, impact of water and salt on agricultural productivity, the relationship between groundwater salinity and irrigation activity, irrigation and drainage infrastructure, best adapted salt-tolerant crops and approaches to drainage management and improvement of soil and irrigation water quality.

This project benefits from the Australian experience in salinity management. Australia’s Murray-Darling river basin had similar salinity symptoms. However, the combined efforts of the national government, farmers, and community managers through integrated resource management since 1980 were able to considerably control the problem and combat its negative effects on agricultural productivity.

Why is it important to sustain the agriculture of Iraq?

Iraq is known to be an agricultural country. According to FAO-Iraq, agriculture is the second largest contributor to GDP growth after oil revenues. Despite the rich and diverse natural resource that Iraq has, its agricultural production has declined to about 3.9% per year over the past two decades

Amongst other reasons, this was due to lack of rehabilitation of infrastructure and degraded facilities, inefficient agricultural services, absence of policies to sustain agricultural growth and lack of community participation.

Today this situation has changed. The Iraqi Ministries in charge have started planning for a sustainable agriculture by adapting sound policies. The Ministry of Agriculture, for example, is aware of the key deficiencies in the system and has adapted needed plans to combat the problems. Ministry of water Resources has released a call for farmers to use proper irrigation methods and reduce water losses.

The uniqueness of Iraq Salinity Project lies in the interaction and the support it provides for five ministries in Iraq. The project has an underlying framework that builds a foundation for a long-term national management plan.

Research Highlights
Large amount of data and surveys have been produced and here are some results that researchers came up to:

•Water productivity can be greatly improved- the irrigation efficiency in the Dujaila irrigation project, for example, is as low as 31-38% and modeling shows that water applications at farm scale could be reduced by 50%;

•There is large potential to increase agricultural production in Iraq via area expansion and closing of the yield gap- Surveys show that in salt affected areas farmers are using about 30% of their land for cropping and are only achieving about 48% of expected yields. •Iraqi farmers make living from off-farm sources- Socio-economic surveys show that Iraqi farmers on saline lands are getting around 60% of their household income from off farm sources. This indicates the adaptability of these households and also that there is potential for farmer investment in new approaches to overcoming salinity;

•Iraqi farmers are adaptable and willing to invest in good technologies- Some outstanding Iraqi farmers use their own best practices to close the yield gap. For example, in the Dujaila irrigation project these outstanding farmers can reduce soil salinity by 50-70% and increase yield cost effectively;

•Several highly productive novel salt tolerant forage species are identified;

•Promising results of Mapping via remote sensing technique could be used by the Government of Iraq to monitor  the saline areas and determine the productivity of land to guide the ongoing investment by the Government of Iraq based on strategic analysis of the soil salinity problem;

•Water salinity in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers shows large increases at key points. This indicates that specific interventions inside Iraq at these key points could help alleviate the high river water salinities in the southern end. Also that implementation of farming techniques and infrastructure investment can be guided by the irrigation water salinity situation to gain maximum returns from the Government of Iraq investment initiatives.

''This project is funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Italian Development Cooperation. A partnership of The Government of Iraq, Ministries of Agriculture, Water Resources, Higher Education, Environment and Science and Technology, with an international research team led by ICARDA in partnership with, the University of Western Australia, CSIRO, IWMI and ICBA.''

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