The Ministry of Agriculture confirmed today, Tuesday, that the lack of water has caused the disruption of half of the arable land in Iraq, as drought during the past four years has disrupted the exploitation of 27 million dunums. Director General of the Ministry’s Agricultural Lands Department, Ali Hammoud Al-Shammari, said that the total arable areas in the country amount to 51 million dunums, but the water scarcity that the country has suffered over the past four years has disrupted the exploitation of 27 million of them, adding that the area exploited by contracts, It reaches 24 million dunams, based on the laws and decisions related to the agricultural sector, which were previously in accordance with Articles 117 of 1970 and 35 of 1983.He pointed out that the transfer of land powers according to Governorate Law No. 13 of 2008 in accordance with Article 40, which clarified the transfer of central departments to the governorates and the state’s direction to decentralized government, causes several problems, explaining that there are some laws and decisions that are followed by the Agricultural Lands Department because it is responsible for organizing the management of the lands. Through contracting, leasing, or transferring ownership to farmers, it is therefore preferable to have it centralized in the Ministry. Al-Shammari continued that the preference for keeping it is due to preserving agricultural lands from disputes, and thus losing most of them in the event of changing the use of the lands during their transfer to the governorates, pointing out the difficulty of managing them by the agricultural departments in the governorates, because they will face difficulties in implementing them in the future, which leads to the occurrence of illegal disputes. Among farmers
