The conservation report from Iraq

Excerpt

The mission of USDA provincial reconstruction team (PRT) agriculture advisors is to help the Iraqi provincial governments build their capacity to govern and provide essential agricultural services to their people.

I am serving as an agriculture advisor on the Diyala Provincial Reconstruction Team. Diyala Province is just east of Baghdad and, until recently, was a region of serious contention. Our provincial reconstruction team just began getting out into the field and is making progress now. Water for irrigation is a critical resource in Diyala Province. The lack of water for much of Diyala's 345,000 ha (853,000 ac) of irrigated cropland and orchards is due to years of limited maintenance. The problem has been exacerbated by lack of rainfall in the mountains, which would normally recharge the one principal irrigation reservoir serving this province. Our work with Iraqi water managers to address silt-plugged canals and failing pumping stations has focused on the critical systems necessary for human water consumption. Due to limited resources, many outlying irrigation systems that support farm fields still need repair. The result is that many fields are flooded and the plugged drains are restricting water flow, resulting in increased salinization. In other cases, fields do not have …