Iraq
Iraq is an upper-middle income country. The large-scale Public Distribution System (PDS), despite operational and financial challenges, provides an in-kind food safety net across the population. The PDS plays a key role in supporting access to food and preventing sustained food consumption deficits across most populations, especially the poor. However, populations that are unable to access the PDS are vulnerable to acute food insecurity, especially internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Iraq is suffering from a severe, multi-year hydrological drought that began in at least 2020. Iraq’s water reserves have declined from 60 billion cubic meters in 2020 to 10 billion today, following consecutive years of poor rainfall and a catastrophic decline in water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In addition to weather, declines in water availability are also due to the effects of dam and water projects in upstream areas of Türkiye, Syria, and Iran; failing water infrastructure; and heightened water demand linked to population growth, urbanization, increasing salinization of the water table, and inefficient agricultural and industrial water use. Seawater incursion into the water table has also decreased drinking water availability in southern Iraq, primarily in and around Basra.
The current drought is expected to persist through the 2025/26 agricultural season, based on forecasts of La Niña-induced below-average rainfall from October to May. Although government interventions have supported crop production in recent years, the government is now focused on constraining cultivation in order to preserve drinking water availability. Water levels in Iraq’s dams are currently so low that the government has issued restrictions on planting for the main winter cropping season. As a result, the wheat and barley harvest ending in July 2026 is expected to be below average in both rainfed-dependent areas in northern Iraq and river- and dam-dependent areas in central and southern Iraq. Declines in pasture availability and livestock fodder production are also anticipated.
The government’s social protection and agricultural subsidy system is expected to limit the scale of acute food insecurity over the next 9-12 months, but a relative increase in the size of the acutely food insecure population is expected. Strategic grain reserves, for instance, are adequate to cover consumption needs for an estimated 14.5 months. However, falling oil prices are expected to substantially reduce government revenue. At the same time, political instability is expected to rise around the November 2025 elections. IDPs may face challenges claiming PDS entitlements, and the government may enact policy changes due to budget shortfalls, such as reducing the frequency and size of PDS rations and reducing farmgate procurement prices that smallholder farmers rely upon.
The impacts of drought are not expected to independently drive sharp increases in social unrest and political instability in the near-term due to the mitigating effects of the PDS on household access to food. Nevertheless, it is possible that social unrest and political instability surrounding the November 2025 elections will lead to an increase in internal displacement. Displaced households face a higher risk of acute food insecurity due to the associated challenges in accessing entitlements.