Once most flourishing civilization, Sumer was located in what was believed to be biblical Garden of Eden. Surrounded by the legendary Tigris and Euphrates rivers both giving the ancient empire wealth and powers. While the rest of humanity was gathering and hunting, people from Ur and Uruk were developing the art of agriculture. The amount of legacies Sumerians transmitted to the world is yet to be precisely established, but archeologists agree that in these lands lies the first trace of writing.

Water was the source of the Sumerian’s strength allowing communication as well as agriculture made possible by the construction of irrigation canals. Breaking free from the rivers’ impetuosity, especially Euphrates’, Sumerians managed to have a controlled amount of water needed to develop marshes.

Since the beginning, water has been a matter of great concern for the civilization. Explaining the fear as well as the respect people had toward floods even tends toward explaining the biblical Flood tradition. Farmers living on the rivers’ shores were highly dependable upon the willing of the Gods, whether they will have the proper quantity of water or if they would suffer overflowing. Leading to a natural adaptation and for Sumerians to master the art of water repartition within the land, digging a complex web of interior canals.

There it was! They had invented the process of human appropriation of the environment, forcing Nature to bend. The rest of the Sumerian civilization’s time was brilliant, importing goods from all over the then known planet, building magnificent cities filled with luxuries and a much envied living style.

But the dream suddenly collapsed. Agriculture was by far the first source of revenues, even wood was coming from what is now Lebanon forcing Gilgamesh to take on his journey. Fields were becoming dry and improper for cereals to grow. Sumer was losing its wealth and was completely enable to tackle the severe plunge of production.

The main cause was salt.

As Paul Krugman says in the New York Times in 2003: “The answer — the reason ‘’the very soil lost its virtue’’ — is that heavy irrigation in a hot, dry climate leads to a gradual accumulation of salt in the soil. Rising salinity first forced the Sumerians to switch from wheat to barley, which can tolerate more salt; by about 1800 B.C. even barley could no longer be grown in southern Iraq, and Sumerian civilization collapsed”.

After the Sumerians, Mesopotamia however hosted brilliants civilizations. Babylonians took over then lost against Assyrians to finally overpower their Nineveh based opponents. Mesopotamians built ziggurats which would nourish the Tower of Babel myth as well as Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

For Sumerians, the very source of their development turned out to be the very reason they’ve perished. The key element they were frightened of, revealed itself to be their worst enemy. Water allowed life to emerge then took back its right and scattered death.

A lesson could have been undertaken from this past. Yet it hasn’t.

After decades of Saddam Hussein’s rules, war with Iran, 1992 international intervention, domestic uprisings, UN embargo, 2003 US invasion and now Syrian conflict repercussions, Iraq has faced during the last centuries never-ending series of plagues.

One of the most suffering populations have been the Shia Marshes Arabs, direct inheritors of the Sumerian tradition. Disconnected from the outside world they remain in an open-air prison, stuck between powers and interests. Highly relying on the marshes near Basra, these fishermen live the same way their ancestors used to. Saddam dried the great marshes of Southern Iraq in retaliation of the 1991 Shia uprising and to allow his army penetrating the region, they now have to face the voracious appetite of the Oil industry. Even if in 2003 lands were intentionally refolded in order to preserve this millenary culture, most of the region Arabs are unable to sustain themselves as they witness swamps drying up again. The fault is shared, but Oil fields in the need of dry lands, are not quite helping.

This is how water becomes a worrying topic all over again. Soil salinity is exhausting to manage and once a land is contaminated there is no recovery any time soon. Lands must therefore be abandoned. Some sources pretend planet Earth loses 3 hectares per minute due to salinization. One of the most affected countries is of course Iraq.

Over drowning lands leads to soil salinity, poor drainage leads to salinity and even drying lands leads to it. Management of this issue is complex, should be undertaken with extra care and close monitoring.

The Iraq Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is responsible for conducting projects aiming to tackle salinization. Yet, the uninterrupted unstable situation Iraq is facing seriously endangered this fight against Nature and human destruction. Giving back the soil its virtue is laboriously becoming a matter of concern for Iraqi leaders and naturally for the past decade it hasn’t been a priority. 80% of the MoA budget is dedicated to internal operating requirements while the remaining 20% is supposed to sustain development programs and investments. Due to lack of capabilities this 20% is yet to find it use, reaching a point where the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been asked to intervene.

Agriculture is the 3rd GDP contributor sector in Iraq up to 3,3% in 2013 according to CIA WorldFactbook and the 2nd employer from 20 up to 25% of the labor force in the country nowadays. Arable lands in Iraq cover 9 million hectares which represent 22% of the country total surface. Among this territory only 60% is cultivated and the technology needs are significant, to which water needs are far from being reached.

In Iraq the agricultural sector consumes 80% of the total water resources as the country faces less than 50 mm waterfall a year. Natural rain is not the only issue Iraq deals with, the country agriculture is also highly dependable upon the rivers’ flows.

For example, the rice culture in the country entirely relies on the Euphrates, forcing the government to reduce the rice culture zone by half in 2009.

To understand the water struggle one should retrace the course of both Euphrates and Tigris. The rivers find their sources in Turkey which therefore vastly impacts Syria and Iraq. Iraq does not have a say in Euphrates’ flow and barely controls 53% of Tigris’ not to mention that Iran also controls 33% of it.

It is then quite easy to understand how much linked Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq are and also how much Iraq is subordinated to the other countries’ willingness. Loosing step by step its water sovereignty the “Iraqi government is reduced to begging its neighbors for water”.

“The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now” says Campbell Robertson in the New York Times.

According to the UN, a third of Iraqi population lives in rural zones and they are the first in line suffering from extreme poverty and malnutrition. Nowadays Iraq imports more or less 80% of its staples among which wheat that once built Sumerians’ supremacy.

“It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq’s identity, not only as the land between two rivers but as a nation that was once the largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with barley and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice” says Robertson.

Together with drought, salinity drastically reduced Iraq’s agriculture capacities and 25 000 hectares are annually affected by salt. Importation needs are opening new markets for foreign greed. Baghdad hosts the US Department of Agriculture’s world second largest office. The Foreign Agricultural Service’s “primary mission in Iraq is economically driven, to create market for the US agricultural exports”, leading Iraq to import $ 1 billion of US agricultural exports in 2008.

Not all Iraq is stricken nevertheless. The Kurdistan region enjoys a much bigger quantity of rainfalls than the rest of the country and in 1975 the region was already providing with 45% of Iraqi wheat. Together with animal husbandry and the Oil industry development, Kurdistan is self-sustainable and jealously protects its sovereignty against Baghdad interferences. That could explain why most of the 220 000 Syrian refugees in Iraq are willing to settle in the autonomous region. That also explains the Kurdish dream of independence toward Iraq.

Added with the amount of refugees, Iraq has to feed the returning Iraqi refugees who fled the 2003 Invasion and the 1 million people who are annually displaced within the borders according to UNHCR. The unemployment rate is slowly decreasing around 15% of the labor force making officials hoping that agriculture could offer the youth with some opportunities.

Robertson notes in his paper: “At a conference in Baghdad — where participants drank bottled water from Saudi Arabia, a country with a fraction of Iraq’s fresh water — officials spoke of disaster.”

The road remains long and paved with obstacles.

(Note: this paper has originally been published in April 2014. Since then, the situation in Iraq evolved dramatically and the amounts of IDP (internally displaced person) as well as refugees have skyrocketed . Battles have been fought against ISIS forces for the control of the dams. Water, has been used as a weapon. Never before has desertification been so far from the top priorities…)