Seeds Of Rebellion?

By Unmesh Kher, with bureau reporting

Could the Iraqi resistance soon be spreading from the cities to the countryside? That's what some U.S. officials fear if the nation's 600,000 farmers face another disastrous growing season. This year's summer season was wrecked largely by the war as well as by the looting of $1 billion worth of fertilizer, seeds and agricultural equipment from 100 warehouses. Now the farmers are worrying about what could be another calamity. They are afraid they may not be able to plant the seeds for the next growing season before the rains begin, any day now. What's missing: fertilizer.

The problems began when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) failed to prepare adequately for the timely import and distribution of half a million tons of fertilizer, according to a former U.S. Department of Agriculture adviser to the CPA. Now, ramshackle vehicles that are supposed to be rushing the fertilizer from Jordan and the southern port city of Basra are stalling on Iraq's rutted, cratered roads. What's at stake is more than just another failed growing season's crops, which include maize, wheat and barley. Agriculture is Iraq's second largest economic sector and largest employer. If farmers have no work, that might fuel recruitment into the ranks of Iraqis battling occupying troops. "The Army regards this as a security issue," says the Agriculture Department official, who just returned from Iraq and is worried that the country's farmers might take to the streets. "It does not want the violence to spill over into the countryside." Haj Abdul Wahab al-Bunnia, 82, patriarch of a family-run agribusiness empire in Iraq that farms 25,000 acres and employs 6,000 people, has the same concerns. "We need to get people off the city streets and back onto the farms," he says. "With incentives, we can do this. But if there is no farm work and farmers have nothing to do, they will take money to blow up something." --By Unmesh Kher, with bureau reporting