Green belt
TREES as far as the eye can see are the weapons one Iraqi province is using in the ght against deserti cation in a country where decades of con ict have exacted a terrible environmental toll. Karbala, 110 km south of Baghdad, sees millions of pilgrims visit every year. But it is also the location of a six-yearold project aimed at ghting worsening deserti cation in Iraq: a “green belt”, or a 27-km crescent lined with thousands of young trees in orderly patterns, irrigated by dozens of wells.
The area had been used as a military encampment but is now the front line of Karbala’s battle against increasingly frequent sandstorms and salinisation of the land.
“If we do nothing, the desert will envelop us,” said Hassan Jabbar, who heads the “green belt” project. “So we must go on the offensive, not on the defensive, and we must establish new irrigation projects.”
The project has involved the planting of 62,000 olive trees, 20,500 palm trees, 37,000 eucalyptus trees, and 4,200 tamarind trees, all of which were chosen for their root strength as well as for the food some eventually produce.
Karbala province Governor Amal al Din al Har, himself a former director of the provincial agriculture department, spoke with pride of the project, and said he hoped to widen the belt tenfold from its current 100-metre width.
“For 30 years, Iraq has been combating deserti cation, but after we established the (national) anti-deserti cation of ce, what we have accomplished in Karbala has been the most ambitious and most successful effort in Iraq,” Har said.
The country’s Environment Ministry estimated in 2009 that 39 per cent of Iraq’s surface was affected by deserti cation, while an additional 54 per cent was under threat.
And while the ministry estimates that 28 per cent of Iraq’s territory is comprised of arable land, around 250 square km are lost every year due to degradation of various kinds.
Iraq is far from the only country affected by deserti cation, but its tumultuous history has made it particularly vulnerable. “Iraq has fought many wars,” noted Mohammed Ghazi Saeed, head of the national Agriculture Ministry’s anti-deserti cation department.