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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
One of the most significant achievements of the fundamentally
urban-based revolutionary regime of Abd al Karim Qasim (1958-63)
was the proclamation and partial implementation of a radical
agrarian reform program. The scope of the program and the drastic
shortage of an administrative cadre to implement it, coupled with
political struggles within the Qasim regime and its successors,
limited the immediate impact of the program to the expropriation
stage. The largest estates were easily confiscated, but
distribution lagged owing to administrative problems and the
wasted, saline character of much of the land expropriated.
Moreover, landlords could choose the best of the lands to keep
for themselves.
The impact of the reforms on the lives of the rural masses
can only be surmised on the basis of uncertain official
statistics and rare observations and reports by outsiders, such
as officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO). The development of cooperatives, especially
in their capacity as marketing agents, was one of the most
obvious failures of the program, although isolated instances of
success did emerge. In some of these instances, traditional
elders were mobilized to serve as cooperative directors, and
former sirkals, clan leaders who functioned as foremen for
the shaykhs, could bring a working knowledge of local irrigation
needs and practices to the cooperative.
The continued impoverishment of the rural masses was evident,
however, in the tremendous migration that continued through the
1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s from rural to urban areas.
According to the Ministry of Planning, the average rate of
internal migration from the countryside increased from 19,600 a
year in the mid-1950s to 40,000 a year in the 1958 to 1962
period. A study of 110 villages in the Nineveh and Babylon
governorates concluded that depressed rural conditions and other
variables--rather than job opportunities in the modern sector--
accounted for most of the migration.
There was little doubt that this massive migration and the
land reform reduced the number of landless peasants. The most
recent comprehensive tenurial statistics available before the war
broke out--the Agricultural Census of 1971--put the total
farmland (probably meaning cultivable land, rather than land
under cultivation) at over 5.7 million hectares, of which more
than 98.2 percent was held by "civil persons." About 30 percent
of this had been distributed under the agrarian reform. The
average size of the holdings was about 9.7 hectares; but 60
percent of the holdings were smaller than 7.5 hectares,
accounting for less than 14 percent of the total area. At the
other end of the scale, 0.2 percent of the holdings were 250
hectares or larger, amounting to more than 14 percent of the
total. Fifty-two percent of the total was owner-operated, 41
percent was farmed under rental agreements, 4.8 percent was
worked by squatters, and only 0.6 percent was sharecropped. The
status of the remaining 1.6 percent was uncertain. On the basis
of limited statistics released by the government in 1985, the
amount of land distributed since the inception of the reform
program totaled 2,271,250 hectares
(see
Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform
, ch. 3).
Political instability throughout the 1960s hindered the
implementation of the agrarian reform program, but after seizing
power in 1968 the Baath regime made a considerable effort to
reactivate it. Law 117 (1970) further limited the maximum size of
holdings, eliminated compensation to the landowner, and abolished
payments by beneficiaries, thus acknowledging the extremity of
peasant indebtedness and poverty.
The reform created a large number of small holdings. Given
the experience of similar efforts in other countries, foreign
observers surmised that a new stratification has emerged in the
countryside, characterized by the rise of middle-level peasants
who, directly or through their leadership in the cooperatives,
control much of the agricultural machinery and its use.
Membership in the ruling Baath Party is an additional means of
securing access to and control over such resources. Prior to the
war, the party seemed to have few roots in the countryside, but
after the ascent of Saddam Husayn to the presidency in 1979 a
determined effort was made to build bridges between the party
cadre in the capital and the provinces. It is noteworthy that
practically all party officials promoted to the second echelon of
leadership at the 1982 party congress had distinguished
themselves by mobilizing party support in the provinces.
Even before the war, migration posed a serious threat of
labor shortages. In the 1980s, with the war driving whole
communities to seek refuge in the capital, this shortage has been
exacerbated and was particularly serious in areas intensively
employing mechanized agricultural methods. The government has
attempted to compensate for this shortage by importing turnkey
projects with foreign professionals. But in the Kurdish areas of
the north--and to a degree in the southern region infested by
deserters--the safety of foreign personnel was difficult to
guarantee; therefore many projects have had to be temporarily
abandoned. Another government strategy for coping with the labor
shortage caused by the war has been to import Egyptian workers.
It has been estimated that as many as 1.5 million Egyptians have
found employment in Iraq since the war began.
Data as of May 1988
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