MONGABAY.COM
Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development (more)
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
|
|
Iraq
Index
Christian church, Baghdad
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
The impact of Western penetration on the indigenous social
and demographic structure in the nineteenth century was profound.
Western influence took the initial form of transportation and
trading links and the switch from tribal-based subsistence
agriculture to cash crop production--mostly dates--for export
(see Agriculture
, ch. 3). As this process accelerated, the
nomadic population decreased both relatively and in absolute
numbers and the rural sedentary population increased
substantially, particularly in the southern region. This was
accompanied by a pronounced transformation of tenurial relations:
the tribal, communal character of subsistence production was
transformed on a large scale into a landlord-tenant relationship;
tribal shaykhs, urban merchants, and government officials took
title under the open-ended terms of the newly promulgated Ottoman
land codes. Incentives and pressures on this emerging landlord
class to increase production (and thus exports and earnings)
resulted in expanded cultivation, which brought more and more
land under cultivation and simultaneously absorbed the "surplus"
labor represented by the tribal, pastoral, and nomadic character
of much of Iraqi society. This prolonged process of
sedentarization was disrupted by the dismemberment of the Ottoman
Empire during and after World War I, but it resumed with renewed
intensity in the British Mandate period, when the political
structure of independent Iraq was formed
(see World War I and the British Mandate
, ch. 1).
This threefold transformation of rural society--pastoral to
agricultural, subsistence to commercial, tribal-communal to
landlord-peasant--was accompanied by important shifts in urban
society as well. There was a general increase in the number and
size of marketing towns and their populations; but the
destruction of handicraft industries, especially in Baghdad, by
the import of cheap manufactured goods from the West, led to an
absolute decline in the population of urban centers. It also
indelibly stamped the subsequent urban growth with a mercantile
and bureaucratic-administrative character that is still a strong
feature of Iraqi society.
Thus, the general outline and history of Iraqi population
dynamics in the modern era can be divided into a period extending
from the middle of the nineteenth century to World War II,
characterized chiefly by urbanization, with a steady and growing
movement of people from the rural (especially southern) region to
the urban (especially central) region. Furthermore, the basic
trends of the 1980s are rooted in the particularly exploitive
character of agricultural practices regarding both the land
itself and the people who work it. Declining productivity of the
land, stemming from the failure to develop drainage along the
irrigation facilities and the wretched condition of the
producers, has resulted in a potentially harmful demographic
trajectory--the depopulation of the countryside--that in the late
1980s continued to bedevil government efforts to reverse the
decades-long pattern of declining productivity in the
agricultural sector.
The accelerated urbanization process since World War II is
starkly illustrated in the shrinking proportion of the population
living in rural areas: 61 percent in 1947, fillowed by 56 percent
in 1965, then 36 percent in 1977, and an estimated 32 percent in
1987; concurrently between 1977 and 1987 the urban population
rose from 7,646,054 to an estimated 11,078,000
(see table _,
Appendix). The rural exodus has been most severe in Al Basrah and
Al Qadisiyah governorates. The proportion of rural to urban
population was lowest in the governorates of Al Basrah (37
percent in 1965, and 1 percent in 1987) and Baghdad (48 percent
in 1965 and 19 percent in 1987). It was highest in Dhi Qar
Governorate where it averaged 50 percent in 1987, followed
closely by Al Muthanna and Diyala governorates with rural
populations of 48 percent. Between 1957 and 1967, the population
of Baghdad and Al Basrah governorates grew by 73 percent and 41
percent respectively. During the same years the city of Baghdad
grew by 87 percent and the city of Basra by 64 percent.
Because of the war, the growth of Al Basrah Governorate has
been reversed while that of Baghdad Governorate has accelerated
alarmingly, with the 1987 census figure for urban Baghdad being
3,845,000. Iranian forces have mounted an offensive each year of
the war since 1980, except for early 1988, seeking to capture
Basra and the adjoining area and subjecting the city to regular
bombardment. As a result, large numbers of the population fled
northward from Basra and other southern areas, with many entering
Baghdad, which was already experiencing overcrowding. The
government has attempted to deal with this situation by moving
war refugees out of the capital and resettling them in other
smaller cities in the south, out of the range of the fighting.
Data as of May 1988
|
|