It’s wheat harvesting season in Iraq right now. But with a war on, no one is in the fields. Instead, Iraqis are waiting for emergency food aid, and U.S. farmers are eager to send it to them — some say, too eager.
WHEAT FARMER Mike Bouris is about 60 days away from harvesting about 6,000 acres of hard red winter wheat in California.
“It’s in the milk stage,” he said on a recent tour of his fields.
Like hundreds of other U.S. grain farmers he’s hoping some of this year’s crop will go to Iraq.
“We were Iraq’s largest supplier until they invaded Kuwait,” he said.
Prior to the first Gulf war, American farmers shipped a million metric tons of wheat a year to Iraq. That ended in 1990 when the U.S. imposed trade sanctions. Under the subsequent oil-for-food program, Australia has become Iraq’s biggest wheat suppliers. But U.S. farmers are eager to reclaim the market.
“We need to get back to where we were 10 years,” said Bouris. “We’ve had a gap of about 10 to 12 years.”
With the oil-for-food program suspended due to the war, the Bush administration is planning to ship 600,000 tons of U.S. wheat to Iraq as part of an emergency food aid program. Growers in California, the nation’s largest farm export state, hope this shipment will help them establish a beachhead — not just for wheat, but raisins, dates, almonds and other commodities grown here.
“We certainly can export many of these commodities from this country and certainly from California,” said Bob Krauter, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. “And certainly we’ll have to kind of wait and see what happens here. But we’re certainly going to make the case that we have a lot to offer to the Iraqi people.”
Farmers from Canada to Australia worry the U.S. will try to use its control of Iraq to muscle them out of the market when the war is over. Some worry the issue could trigger a major trade dispute.
But farmer Mike Bouris believes Iraq’s wheat market will be big enough to support multiple suppliers, provided the war doesn’t drag on or cause too much damage to the economy.
“In a free economy I would think we could be selling them 3 million tons,” he said. “And there’d be plenty for everybody.”
For now, the focus is on getting the emergency grain supplies to the Iraqi people. But over longer term, the Bush administration may have to choose between supporting U.S. farmers or allowing Australia to keep its dominant share of the Iraqi wheat market as a reward for its support of the allied military campaign.