Seeds of Kurdistan

On our filming trip in June it became evident that agricultural life in Northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan) is completely distinct from the rest of the country. There are a few reasons for this, but the security situation is an obvious place to start. Because the Kurdish region has been semi-autonomous since the 1990s, they have a head start on the rest of the country in terms of reconstruction, they have also not had to deal with issues of sectarian violence to the same degree that other areas of the country have. As a result what we found in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah was something of an agricultural boom. The Kurdish region has always been one of the major food producing areas for the whole country. While farmers and agricultural advisers in the rest of Iraq are talking about rebuilding irrigation systems and getting farmers to move back to their land, the Kurdish Ministry of Agriculture is implementing a plan for the region to be entirely self-sufficient in food production by 2012, though ambitious this goal does not seem remotely unrealistic.