A Canadian soldier from Force Protection Company, part of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team, is standing on guard behind a patrol vehicle in the village of Nakodak, near Kandahar.
Credit: Canadian MOD

Continuing my coverage of the rebuilding of the Iraqi chicken industry…

Before the war, numerous areas in Iraq thrived off the chicken industry. Hawr Rajab, Arab Jabour and Adwaniyah all had prosperous chicken markets.

“Historically, this was the largest chicken-producing area in Iraq,” said Capt. Michael Lenart, commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 2-3 Brigade Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division.

Insurgent violence ravaged the industry. Chicken coops and pens were used by insurgents as safe houses and weapons cache dumps. Electrical equipment such as cables, generators and water pumps were stolen or neglected after al-Qaida threatened employees to quit coming to work.

With security gains removing al-Qaida from the area, the effort is to boost chicken farming back to pre-war levels.

“Right now it is in its first phase,” said Baghdad-7 embedded provincial reconstruction team economics team chief, Capt. Shawn Carbone, of the restoration plans. He added the ePRT has established relationships, helped develop business plans and submitted applications for funding.

Funding will come from Commander’s Emergency Relief Program and U.S. Department of State funds, Carbone said, as well as contributions from former owners.

The Adwaniyah Farmers Union Chairman, Falih Sha’lan Jassim, used funds from the union to purchase 10,000 chicks to jumpstart the Adwaniyah chicken factories. In Arab Jabour, the owner of the Al Mazra’a Kupa and Chicken processing facility, Ghassan Mohammed Ali, has pledged more than $300,000 towards restoring his factory.

Ali’s factory, first constructed in 1982, can employ up to 95 people at full capacity. Larger factories such as the Al Raad Poultry slaughterhouse in Hawr Rajab, which includes six chicken coops, a feed-producing factory, and a processing plant that slaughters, cleans, packages and stores chickens, can employ up to 500 people, Carbone added.

Production will create new markets and opportunities. Transportation companies will be needed to move products to market and mechanics will be needed to maintain the machinery used for processing, said Carbone, a native of Niagara Falls, N.Y. The main market for chickens is currently Baghdad.

Baghdad chicken breeders will also benefit, said Lenart. Currently chickens and supplies needed to renovate buildings are purchased in Baghdad.

Structurally the buildings are stable; all that’s needed to start production is repairing machinery and cleaning out the buildings, said Lenart, a native of Richmond Hill, Ga.

Getting production started will help bring the Government of Iraq into the equation as well. Because the industries are privately owned, the GoI has not been largely involved. Government support has been largely limited to the Ministry of Agriculture providing vaccines to local veterinarians, Lenart said.

Once the businesses are up and running though, their involvement in newly-created business associations will give them government-related business incentives, loans and grants, Carbone said. Like the area farmers unions, which are recognized by the MoA, the chicken factories are currently forming their own subcommittees and will receive government aid.

Business owners are also taking classes from an Iraqi-run business development center in Hilla to help their companies prosper once they begin production.

The success of the industry is vital to not only the local communities, but to all of Iraq. A stable economy ties in with and supports security gains.

“Self-sustainment keeps out the influence of insurgents,” Carbone said. “Only when there is no alternative do people turn to violence.”

The projects will continue, with 5,000 more chickens set to be delivered in Adwaniyah on April 22. In the future, chickens will come from within the area from a hatchery under construction.

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By Sgt. Kevin Stabinsky
2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division

I love the name of the company in this story.

The Ready Made Clothing Company is ready to take on a greater load thanks to the donation of an 850-kilowatt generator to the factory in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, April 12.

The factory currently operates at 10 percent of its former capacity, using only a small area of its complex. The new generator, for which the Baghdad-4 embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, attached to 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, coordinated delivery, will end bouts of intermittent power and increase job opportunities as well as production. The increased power will allow the factory to return to two shifts and significantly increase the number of employees, which now stands at 45.

Mahmudiyah Qada Mayor Jabbar Farraj Mullah al-Chalabi thanked the ePRT and coalition forces for the donation of the generator which he hopes will lead to employment of an additional 150 Iraqis.

“The generator should provide enough power to allow all the machines to function, bringing the factory back to its pre-war capacity,” said Mussif Jaseem, manager of Ready Made Clothing Company.

The delivery of the generator is good news to the women of Iraq too, as this brings them one step closer to employment.

“The on-the-job training center will be focused on educating women for jobs in the local economy,” said Capt. Martrell Gamble, 3rd BCT, 101st Abn. Div. officer in charge of the women’s outreach project.

Gamble and other female Soldiers facilitated multiple meetings with local Iraqi women in February to see what kinds of job opportunities they would like to see in their communities. As a result, some of the currently unused portions of the Ready Made Clothing Company complex will be turned into a vocational center for Iraqi women to learn skills such as sewing, computers and health education.

Once renovations of those buildings take place, Gamble said the hope is that up to 600 women will receive vocational training and then gain employment from the Ready Made Clothing Company.

The company was established in 1975 and was fully operational by 1980. It employed an average of 700 people, 80 percent of whom were women.

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By Sgt. 1st Class Kerensa Hardy
3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division

The Ninewah Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) has been working to join hundreds of northern Iraqi farmers together, regardless of ethnicity, tribe or religious backround, to create three farmer’s associations.

“We have found some true leaders of various communities willing to cross community, ethnic and sectarian bounds and work together across the entire community to get these groups involved,” said Michael Hankey, Dept. of State officer in charge of the economic section of the Ninewah PRT. “There is a commitment and eagerness of each organization to find ways to work together to find community wide solutions.”

The PRT donated nine 80-horsepower, four-wheel drive, Iraqi-built tractors at a price of $225,000 to the three farming associations in the hopes that more local investors will be encouraged by the PRT’s investment and invest their own money into the economy.

“The amount of assistance we can give is a good thing,” Hankey said, “but the true economic potential is going to be released when we can find more and more of these Iraqi investors willing to put up their own money, energize their own local economies and look for local investment opportunities that put their own resources into play.”

Local Iraqi businessman George Kako more than matched the PRT’s investment. Kako is one of seven board members on one of the associations called the Brotherhood Union for Agricultural Development and Environmental Protection, which represents approximately 100 families amounting to 600 to 700 people.

“People have made empty promises to us in the past, but thanks to the PRT, this time we have received the tractors and we are moving forward,” Kako said. “These tractors will plow the land much deeper, allowing the soil to retain moisture much longer, allowing the seeds to grow much stronger yielding better crops.”

“The land is very tired,” said Anwar Alyas Kako, cousin of George Kako and member of the organization. “The tractors are excellent, with many horsepower. Originally we had primitive harvesting and plowing tools. But these tractors will dig the soil much better.”

As a part of the organization, members share their newfound wealth.

“When we finish with the tractors, we will take them to other farms in the community and allow them to use them so that our whole community is more productive,” said a member of the organization.
“The organization will help bring in new and fresh ideas and allow agriculture here to grow. Modern techniques will help increase productivity. We will work together as a group. We will decide together what we will plant and when and we will do it in an organized manner to improve our output of crops every year.”

In addition to large investments made by outside entities, the associations are beneficial to the local farmers in many other ways.

Iraq’s harsh climate can make it difficult to produce healthy, frequent and consistent crops. The hot, arid summers make farming heavily dependant on the rain. Fertilizers are required to make the soil usable.

The farmers have had to go without chemical fertilizers. In order to make the soil usable, farmers had to allow their soil to rest for one year after reaping crops. They would plow the land, let it lay fallow for a year, then sow the seed to allow the land to recover on its own, seriously depleting their productivity and livelihood.

“Things like fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems will be cheaper to purchase because together as an organization we will buy in bulk,” said Anwar Kako. “We are working together to buy sprayers and wells so that we don’t rely on rain and fertilizer for better soil. These things are all benefits of the organization.”

The organizations dream is to increase the fertility of the soil to the point that producing several crops a year is a reality.

The organizations began in the Spring of 2007 when local farmers identified some of their basic needs. They were unable to get fuel, fertilizer, seed or pesticide at the subsidized prices that Saddam Hussein’s regime used to give them.

“We could provide them seeds, which may get them by for that day, but we were looking for a more institutional response, something that we could set up to help these farmers carry on in a more sustainable way,” said Hankey.

This is just the beginning of this agricultural community, but farmers and the U.S. Dept. of State are committed to these association’s causes and are working for a brighter future, regardless of culture or religious beliefs.

“We are hopeful that this country will experience the agriculture revolution that many European countries have experienced,” said Kako. “As Iraqis, multi ethnicity is a part of who we are. It’s the terrorists who imported all of these ideas of hatred from abroad. We ourselves are one country irrespective of our creed or our origin. I am very comfortable being a part of this association, it’s a harbinger of good things to come.”

Word of the organization’s success is spreading across northern Iraq and several more associations are surfacing, 18 more in Ninewah Province over the last six weeks.

“We are very happy that Iraqis across the province are already reaching out to each other to find an institutional response to some of their hardest economic questions,” said Hankey. “We are really encouraged that this idea is taking off. Every week we are finding out that there are more and more farmers throughout the province who are looking at copying this model and finding that putting local cooperation into finding common responses to shared problems can help them address some of their most urgent needs.”

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By Spc. John Crosby
115th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
Multi-National Division – North Public Affairs

Senior Airman Felicita Torres-Perkins, an ISAF medic, passes out internal parasite treatment medication to children in Jarullah village.

Afghan health care providers from the Qalat Provincial Hospital joined ISAF medical personnel from the Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) for a visit to the village of Jarullah Tuesday.

Two Afghan nurses, along with the PRT’s doctor and medic, provided vitamins and intestinal parasite treatment to about 150 Afghan men, women and children.

While this visit was an initiative to assist the people of Jarullah, the main objective was for the local nurses to obtain medicine and demonstrate how they could take care of the villagers themselves.

“This mission was important because it is outreach to the community,” said Senior Airman Felicita Torres-Perkins, Zabul PRT medic. “As a medic, my task was to give the women prenatal and multi-vitamins so they can build up their tolerance to viruses and diseases and have a healthier life.”

“Our goal today was to see as many women and children as possible and my personal goal is to try to help the Afghan people improve their quality of life,” said Airman Torres-Perkins.

Dr. (Capt.) James Arnold, family practice doctor with the Zabul PRT, oversaw the visit and coordinated the medical efforts of the Afghan nurses from the Qalat hospital.

“I went over the medications with the local nurses, and they were very familiar with all of them,” said Dr. Arnold. “They saw the patients and gave out the medicine. Eventually, I’d like to see them get medicine on their own and treat the villagers themselves. Our job here is not to do the work ourselves, but to empower the Afghan people to take care of each other.”

Dr. Arnold’s other goal is to help with women’s healthcare problems.

“I think women’s health is the biggest concern I have,” Dr. Arnold said. “If there’s any opportunity to empower women to learn midwife skills or nursing, if there’s a way I can pass on that knowledge to them, I would think of it as a great success.”

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