A flood of concrete

Iraq's construction boom threatens its food

For thousands of years, Iraq’s two great rivers would top their banks and bathe the land in nutrient-rich silts. Today, a flood of concrete is washing outward from the cities that straddle these same rivers: Wave after wave of urban sprawl around Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kerbala, Fallujah, and others are poisoning the waters and devouring the fertile land the country desperately needs. Rarely mentioned in discussions of Iraq’s climate crisis, the building binge is among the country’s most urgent environmental challenges.

Ravenous real estate

Iraq’s capital city is a frenzy of construction: roads being repaved or expanded, bridges built, tunnels dug. New buildings spring up left and right, from modest single-family homes to luxury malls and housing complexes. Roadsides are crowded with diggers, cranes, and debris. At the checkpoints that ring the city, hulking trucks sag under tons of rebar and cinderblocks. “You can smell cement everywhere,” said a doctor who has fashioned his garden into a verdant refuge, in a northern neighborhood of Baghdad. “It lingers in the air.”

In some respects, this boom can be chalked up to simple economics. Iraq is awash with cash, thanks to high oil prices and—many claim—money laundering, fueled by years of plunder and lucrative networks of corruption. What it lacks, by contrast, is decent infrastructure: from roads and public services to affordable housing for a population that is still doubling at every new generation. Baghdad in particular is infamously overcrowded. That means rocketing real estate prices: Many locals speak fluently, and incredulously, about the cost per square meter of land in this or that neighborhood. Everywhere, plots originally meant for one villa with a garden are now bursting with multiple, tiny houses crammed together, blotting out any soil and any air.

For the Iraqi state, big budget construction projects are a quick and efficient way to dole out patronage to crony companies and, allegedly, generate kickbacks for officials. But there’s also a political logic at work, as Iraq’s leaders seek to burnish their public standing ahead of 2025’s parliamentary elections. “This government came in knowing they needed to focus on public works,” said an Iraqi economist in the capital. “People are fed up with having crap services.” Of course, that electoral calculus has drawbacks: namely a focus on short-term wins and a preference for highly visible projects in influential areas of the capital. The economist went on:

Any project with a timeline longer than 24 months is a no-go. And what kind of projects do you think politicians will focus on? They will repave a street that is full of medical facilities and has maybe 100,000 people passing through it every week. They’re not focused on the dwindling number of farmers in some middle of nowhere village, where maybe 10 families will benefit from improved services.

Smothering agriculture

That’s not to say Iraq’s provinces have been untouched by the building spree. On the contrary, sprawl has radiated outward from Baghdad, eating up what was once fertile agricultural land. Some now speak wistfully of the days when Saddam Hussein’s regime imposed strict limitations on urban expansion into farmland. Along the highway stretching north from the capital, construction sites encroach upon groves of date palms; some trees are visibly battered, blackened where their trunks meet the soil. The doctor from Baghdad explained: “People come in the night, pour gasoline and burn the palm trees. With the trees destroyed, they can redevelop the land as real estate. I have a friend who adopted this approach, and now has a multimillion dollar business.”

Since 2002, concrete has devoured green space on Baghdad's northern edge.

The impact is not limited to the capital: Smaller urban centers are likewise spilling out into farmland. Often that means creeping closer to the banks of the Tigris or Euphrates, which historically nourished nearby farms with silt and ready access to irrigation water. But if the rivers make for prime agricultural land, they also make attractive housing for people keen to escape the price and congestion of cities. A farmer outside Ramadi explained: “It no longer makes economic sense to plant date palms here. Instead, people cut them down and build houses along the Euphrates.”

Indeed, the problem of sprawl is not just about runaway demand for housing. It also reflects the relentless deterioration of agriculture as an economic sector. “It’s very hard to make a living from farming,” said a state-employed professor in the town of Dhuluiya, which sits on a fertile bend in the Tigris in Salaheddin province. “Maybe five percent of people here are full-time farmers. Most prefer to work for the state.” He himself is a state employee, as are his two relatives who joined for breakfast. A lawyer whose family owns agricultural lands elsewhere in Salaheddin echoed the point: “People have been abandoning agriculture for years, because it’s not economically viable. It’s hard for landowners to find good workers, because nobody wants to do hard labor on a farm when you could make triple the wages working for the state.”

It's tempting to pin agriculture’s troubles on climate change, water shortages, or the many rounds of conflict visited upon the country—including, most recently, a bloody campaign to uproot ISIS, in which vindictive militias torched farms and looted livestock. But many Iraqis are quick to emphasize yet another problem: namely the post-2003 collapse of centralized agricultural planning. Farmers who previously enjoyed extensive top-down support have largely been left to fend for themselves. Chaotic privatization has had predictable, familiar consequences: decaying water and electricity infrastructure, weak access to credit, expensive inputs, a flood of cheap imports from neighboring countries, and a market dominated by price-gouging middlemen. “There’s this notion that climate change killed agriculture in Basra,” grumbled one researcher. “But Basra hasn’t had agriculture since 2003.”

Basra, too, has lost green space to concrete.

Cementing scarcity

The physical traces of this decline litter Iraq’s landscape. Southeast of Fallujah, plots of land that once grew food are now fallow and caked in salt. Around the country, agricultural machinery sits in the countryside, rusted and unused. In a farming village north of Ramadi, lush fields are interspersed with newly built houses and irrigation canals clogged with reeds, trash, and debris. While hundreds of date palms remain standing, many others lie in piles of charred trunks on the roadside.“Iraq used to be one of the leading date exporters in the world,” mourned another farmer, who is also an employee with a state agricultural body.

This trend is all the more ominous for the fact that it is self-perpetuating. Urban sprawl feeds itself, by creating the infrastructure—and thus financial incentives—to encourage more urban sprawl. A contractor from a town outside Fallujah explained his own investment logic: “I bought a nice piece of agricultural land along the Euphrates. I’m now dividing it up into smaller plots to build houses on it, and then will build a road to increase the property value.” Indeed, the state employee in Ramadi noted that conveniences—like paved roads, electricity, and shops—are part of what drives city dwellers to settle the countryside, pouring yet more concrete on vanishing farmland.

Some also warn about a shift that is less visible, but perhaps even more consequential. “Young people here don’t want to study agriculture because there are no jobs,” said a journalist in Basra. “They study medicine, or types of engineering that will help them get jobs with oil companies.” Absent state planning to invest in agricultural knowledge, this generational drift threatens yet another feedback loop: If young people aren’t studying agriculture, educational institutes may be forced to cut back on their capacity to teach it. The journalist went on: “When I graduated from the University of Basra, the agricultural college was one of the biggest. Today there are so few students enrolling that they might be forced to close.”

* * *

The flood of concrete is not confined to Iraq. It is washing across the Middle East, at the expense of precious water resources and some of the region’s best farmland. In Jordan, horizontal sprawl consumes fertile soil in highland areas suited to rainfed agriculture. Damascus, once an oasis ringed by orchards, has gobbled up both its green spaces and water sources. Egypt’s regime has mostly abandoned the country’s historic food basket in the Nile Delta; instead, it directs scarce money and water toward concrete vanity projects, notably a new administrative capital and an artificial river that would divert the Nile’s flow to corporate farms in the desert. In Lebanon’s Koura, hillsides once dense with olive groves were transformed into rubble-strewn quarries… in order to feed nearby cement factories, which in turn enable a scourge of buildings across the country’s landscapes.

Of course, urban sprawl and rural disinvestment are not unique to the region either. They are, in many ways, the story of our era, in rich and poor countries alike. What arguably makes Iraq—and the Middle East—distinctive is the speed with which this transformation is occurring, the fragility of the ecosystems it washes over, and the scale of the consequences if it proceeds apace. In the space of a few decades, experienced farmers in some of history’s greatest agricultural societies have lost the ability to feed themselves—let alone their fast-growing societies. Climate change, to be sure, will accelerate this trend. It will also distract from the role played by profiteering regimes, capital-rich investors, and international donors who have long pushed for chaotic privatization. What will it take to realize that cement starves the land that feeds us?



22 July 2024

Alex Simon is Synaps co-founder and environment program director. Fieldwork conducted in partnership with IFPO, with support from Fahad Sudaid and TM.

Grateful illlustration credit: Camille Ammoun, "The Dolosse of Dalieh." Satellite images via Google Earth.