An Iraqi farmer's almanac would tell you it's the wrong season for war.
The Iraqi government's food-rationing system, the daily sustenance for most of its people, is crumbling. That, along with the wartime threat to the grain crop, points toward a huge emergency in the coming weeks, requiring possibly "the biggest humanitarian operation in history," said Khaled Mansour, regional spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program in Amman.
U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks said Saturday that the U.S. military, its coalition partners and civilian organizations have positioned millions of meals, medicines and other supplies for the Iraqi people.
Because of distribution shortcomings and the fact that many poorer Iraqis sold their rations for needed cash, the WFP believes most Iraqis have food not for two months, but for less than six weeks.
By next month, they should be harvesting their winter wheat and barley. That grain crop was projected at 1.7 million tons nationally, a third of it from four Euphrates and Tigris river provinces south and southeast of Baghdad. "Iraqis depend on that crop to feed themselves," Came said.
Tough U.N. disarmament rules also kept some pesticides out of Iraq because they theoretically might be converted to chemical weapon use. As a result, "there are all kinds of bugs in the plants in Iraq," Came said.
