Iraq’s long-cherished goal of achieving self-sufficiency in wheat is faltering this season as a deepening water crisis tightens its grip on the Middle Eastern nation, threatening domestic food security, rural livelihoods and the viability of one of the world’s oldest agricultural regions.
Historically, one of the Middle East’s biggest wheat importers, Iraq has been expanding domestic wheat production and building state reserves through strategic investment in higher-yielding varieties, modernising the country’s irrigation system, and generous grain subsidies to encourage farmer plantings each season.
The plan has boosted Iraq’s strategic wheat reserves to over 6 million metric tonne in recent years, overwhelming the nation’s limited and aging silo capacity. The government, which is reported to have purchased around 5.1MMT from the record 6.3MMT harvest last year, announced in September that current reserves could meet up to a year of domestic demand.
The large harvest, which came from a record area of 2.7 million hectares, prompted a declaration in June last year by Iraq’s Minister of Trade, Atheer Al-Ghurairy, that wheat self-sufficiency had been achieved. However, this revelation relates only to the sum of viable domestic milling capacity and stockfeed demand and ignores the substantial flour import program required to nourish the burgeoning population.
Now, the driest year in modern history, combined with record-low water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the primary sources of irrigation water, those hard-earned advances are at risk, reducing plantings and threatening to slash the wheat harvest by up to 50 per cent this season.
Once symbols of abundance, the two rivers, which both originate in Türkiye and were once a critical part of the ancient cradle of civilisation known as the Fertile Crescent, are drying up. “Iraq is facing one of the most severe droughts that has been observed in decades,” according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s Iraq representative, Salah El Hajj Hassan.
The country of more than 46 million people is experiencing a sharp decline in water supply due to a tangle of environmental and geopolitical factors. Rising temperatures, declining rainfall, and the prolonged drought have compounded the problem, while the construction of new upstream dams in Syria, Türkiye and Iran have reduced the river flows that supply 70 per cent of Iraq’s water.
Water infrastructure is also broken and outdated following decades of war, sanctions and political instability. Drilling new wells is not viable in many parts of the country as the groundwater aquifers are falling, making extraction more costly. The groundwater table around the southern port city of Basra has reportedly already fallen by at least three metres and as much as five metres in some locations.
As a result, the nation’s water reserves have plunged from 60 billion cubic metres in 2020 to less than 4 billion today, prompting the government to introduce strict rationing for farmers. “Rain-fed and irrigated agriculture are directly affected nationwide,” El Hajj Hassan advised.
At the same time, water demand is increasing due to growing urban populations and a thirsty agricultural sector, which consumes more than 80 per cent of Iraq’s water resources. In response, Iraq’s agriculture ministry has halved the area allocated to river-irrigated wheat for the 2025–2026 season to 100,000 hectares and mandated modern irrigation systems, such as drip and sprinkler technology. Rice farming, a highly water-intensive crop, has been banned altogether. The ministry is also allocating just 350,000 hectares in specific desert areas for groundwater irrigation. That, too, is contingent on the use of modern irrigation technology.
According to Mukhtar Khamis, an environmental expert and head of the Iraqi Green Climate Organisation, the upstream dams on the two rivers, particularly those constructed by Türkiye, are significantly restricting water flow to Iraq. Years of corruption and mismanagement have also left the country in a vulnerable position when negotiating water-sharing agreements with its neighbours.
Nevertheless, in November last year, the two countries formalised the multi-billion-dollar Water Cooperation Framework Agreement, under which Turkish firms will build new infrastructure to improve Iraq’s water efficiency and storage. The projects will be financed with Iraqi oil revenues, effectively converting some of the country’s crude oil exports into water security. Under the deal, Iraq will sell an agreed number of barrels of oil each day, with the proceeds deposited into a fund to pay Turkish companies for work on approved infrastructure projects.
The agreement, however, has drawn widespread scepticism and concern. Shurook Alabayachi, a Baghdad based politician and water policy expert, believes water is a human right and should not be a commodity tied to oil revenues. She warned the Turkey deal “departs from internationally recognised principles of water diplomacy.” It is not a solution to Iraq’s water crisis, she declared, calling instead for “a long-term, sovereign, professional, and internationally aligned water policy,” including reform of the country’s agriculture sector.
Meanwhile, wheat consumption in Iraq is expected to total 8.2MMT in 2025/26, with around 7.5MMT, or 91.5 per cent, going into food, seed and industrial (FSI) uses. The relatively small stockfeed sector consumes the 0.7MMT balance. The country’s wide-reaching Public Distribution System, which plays a key role in supporting access to food and preventing sustained food consumption deficits nationwide, accounts for around 70 per cent of the FSI demand and is primarily distributed as flour.
The United States Department of Agriculture is pegging Iraq’s wheat imports at 3.0MMT in the 2025/26 marketing year (July/June), up from 2.7MMT in 2025/25. This includes wheat-equivalent flour imports, the majority of which come from Türkiye. However, this forecast is based on the USDA’s current wheat production estimate of 4.4MMT, a 26.6 per cent year-on-year decrease, when the latest projections suggest a 50 per cent decrease is now likely.
Traditionally a significant supplier of wheat to Iraq, imports of Australian wheat totalled 470,000 metric tonne in the 12 months to November 30 last year. This compares to just one cargo of 36,000 metric tonne in the previous corresponding period but is less than half the 1.0MMT imported in the 12-month period ending in November 2023.
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Written by Peter McMeekin.
