The Food and Agriculutre Organisation (FAO) has appealed for 86 million dollars in aid to help save Iraq's food harvest.

The request is part of the UN's 2.2 billion dollar appeal launched last week to assist the Iraqi people over the next six months. Of the total, 1.3 billion dollars is required by the World Food Programme (WFP), the world's largest food aid organisation.

But FAO, the world's top agency for food production, fears that failure to harvest Iraq's winter wheat and barley crop would contribute to a catastrophe.

"We've made this appeal because of the very great importance of food production in helping Iraq," FAO chief spokesman Nick Parsons told AFP..

"It's 1.7 million tonnes of food that if it isn't harvested, would have to come in as food aid.

"That's four months supply. If you were to visualise it, it would be about 100,000 truckloads of food aid. That is an enormous amount."

The funds are required for a swathe of projects designed to protect harvest, increase food production, prevent animal diseases, coordinate relief efforts and ensure water supplies in rural areas.

"Loss of the winter harvest, especially in Iraq's northern 'bread basket' provinces, which account for more than half of the country's entire cereal production would further aggravate what is already a difficult situation," said Laurent Thomas, head of FAO's emergency programmes.

The Rome-based agency said Iraq's farmers will require seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, fuel, spare parts and other tools they need to plant, harvest and secure current and future crops.

Almost 10 million dollars is earmarked for a project to support the country's 4,000 poultry farms, which FAO says are an essential source of the animal proteins missing from the country's food basket.

The aim is to get the poultry industry back to its pre-war production levels of 155,000 tonnes of poultry meat and two billion eggs annually.

SPACE.WIRE