Years of sanctions and UN mishandling destroyed the Kurdish tradition of agriculture. Now is the time to revive the farms.

We have all recently become subjected to the bland and monotonous fruit and vegetables that are invading our supermarket shelves.

The hundreds of identical, perfect tomatoes, the dozens of tasteless apples, and the boring oval potatoes are good examples of the genetically modified food craze that is taking over the western world.

So let us go back a few generations, to when the Kurdish winters were colder and lasted much longer, and all naturally grown crops were preserved in imaginative ways ready for this tiring season.

Whether tomatoes were sun-dried, vine leaves were kept in brine, berries were preserved in jams or the Kurdish specialty of simply storing pomegranates under hay, there was little fault with the end product and no real hindrance in these natural processes.

When sugar had not yet arrived in Kurdistan, tea was sweetened by sultana conserves and surely this conception is healthier than the current of sugar in every glass of tea! The produce that used to be available in Kurdistan was far superior to the new European ‘organic’ ranges of these foods, with regards to their taste.

Ask any Kurd and they will be sure to miss the sensations that the old foods brought to their palates. This is not to say the produce was perfect, for instance, the same oddly shaped tomatoes that are such a delight to taste are also very easy to bruise and had a comparatively short shelf life and yet their intense color, scent and flavor more than made up for that fact.

Carrots, which were hard to find all over the world, existed in Kurdistan in three varieties, one vividly yellow, one the traditional orange and the last a deep purple with a yellow centre.

And funnily enough, companies are now paying British farms to grow the purple carrot and sell it under a giant “NEW ORGANIC” sign in supermarkets today.

It is such a shame that the Kurdish carrots no longer exist in Kurdistan yet developed countries now crave it as another superficially fashionable food.

It is an impressive fact to note that the name Kurdistan was placed on the map as part of Iraq because of its massive potential for agriculture in the mountainous region, along with its prosperity in oil.

It was rumored that the Kurdish area could fill Iraq’s void with raw materials and resources to essentially strengthen the country. So what went wrong? The main culprits of this situation are the United Nations and Saddam Hussein.

Thirteen years of the UN ‘trying’ to help Kurdistan resulted in them allocating seeds as part of the sanctions that would last for a maximum of two years, from other countries for aid in agriculture.

Now the problem with this was that the demand for Kurdish produce went down and so many existing farms simply stopped what they were doing. Also, when new seeds were needed, they were not accessible to Kurds.

So instead of encouraging native farmers to make more produce, buying their stock and distributing it, a massive vacuum was created in the Kurdish primary job sector, essentially making this area even more underdeveloped and poor.

In a way, the weaker but consistent original produce was far better than no local produce at all. For 30 years before that, Saddam Hussein and his regime put monstrous efforts into destroying the Kurdish farmlands with chemicals, land mines thus massively impairing the arable farming world.

The KRG encourages farms to re-emerge and has plans to focus on re-building an efficient agricultural network that can sustain itself. But this takes time and is a difficult task, especially since farming has now become a less fashionable career compared to say business in Kurdistan.

Only a very tiny percentage of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the Kurdish region are actually grown there, and most of the produce is in fact imported from neighboring countries from GM farms.

I admit that GM foods can be good in terms of prolonging shelf life, but the quality of the flavor of the foods are at a much lower standard than the organic, original and natural local foods.

Moreover, the chemical tampering with raw materials increases likeliness of allergic reactions, and who knows what potentially toxic chemicals you have in your stomach after consuming them.