The harvest
Iraq grows most of its wheat, not all of it, and the bread it eats depends on two things it does not control: the rain that falls on the north and the rivers that come from Turkey and Iran. When either fails, the shortfall is bought abroad.
57%
of the wheat Iraq ate in 2025/26 it grew itself: 4.4 million tonnes grown, 2.7 bought abroad, 7.7 eaten. The harvest was 27% smaller than 2024’s. USDA’s estimate for 2026/27: 5.8 million tonnes grown, about 73% of what Iraq will eat.
Grown, and bought
The wheat Iraq had each year since 2000: what its farms grew and what it imported. The harvest swings with the water — a record 6.0 million tonnes in 2024, 4.4 in 2025 — and the imports fill the gap.
- Grown in Iraq
- Imported
USDA’s market years: the harvest of that year and the twelve months after it. National figures, so they include the Kurdistan Region. Grown plus imported is not exactly what was eaten: the difference goes into or comes out of stores.
The spring that decides it
Most of Iraq’s wheat and barley is sown in autumn and made or lost in March and April. Satellites read how healthy the crops are every ten days; FAO counts the share of each governorate’s cropland in drought. In spring 2025 it was Duhok (79%) and Nineveh (69%) — the north, where most wheat lives on the rain.
The worst springs since 1984, by how many governorates had most of their cropland in drought: 1989 (13 of 18), 2008 (8 of 18) and 1990 (7 of 18). The stripes under the map show every spring; pick one to map it.
The index reads crop health, not the harvest: irrigated land in the centre and south can stay green in a dry spring as long as the rivers carry water — which is why the water story matters here too. The water is leaving →
HOW THESE NUMBERS ARE MADE
- Wheat — the US Department of Agriculture’s Production, Supply and Distribution database, Iraq, revised every month; the newest year is USDA’s estimate. USDA’s PSD ↗ Grown → Imported → Eaten →
- Spring drought — FAO’s Agricultural Stress Index: the share of cropland whose vegetation health fell below drought level, averaged over the six readings of March and April. FAO’s Iraq page ↗
- The map — governorate boundaries from geoBoundaries (public domain), drawn within the site’s outline of Iraq.