Iraq Data Book

Last update: August 2025

This page contains information about some of the data available in the FEWS NET Data Explorer (FDE) for Iraq. This is not a comprehensive guide.

For information about using the filters and fields for specific domains in the FDE, see Choose a Data Domain.

Summary table

Country food security context

Statistical reporting units

Iraq usually uses administrative units as their statistical reporting units.

Administrative (admin) units are the geographical areas into which a country is divided. FEWS NET uses the following terminology: National boundary = admin 0, First sub-national division = admin 1 (e.g., states in the United States), Second sub-national division = admin 2 (e.g., counties in the United States), and so on.

Admin 1: Governorates (muhafazah) plus Halabja, often referred to as a partially-recognized governorate. Halabja is still engaged in a stalled effort to gain federal recognition after being split from Al-Sulaymaniyah in 2014. 

Admin 2: Districts (kaza). 

Admin 3: Sub-districts.

A fourth type of administrative structure, originally intended to have functions usually associated with an Admin 1 entity, the Federal Region, is a voluntary association of more than 1 governorate for the purpose of exercising greater control of its rights and responsibilities viz-a-viz the Federal Government. Only one Federal Region has been formed, consisting of four Kurdish-majority governorates, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, and Halabja.  Recent national court decisions put the future role of the Federal Region in doubt. 

The FDW contains relationship tables which define two annual sets of boundaries (Admin 0-1) for 2000 and 2014 for Iraq. Each describes the temporal and hierarchical relationships of statistical reporting units as of an effective date, until a new annual set overtakes it. Taken together, they describe a genealogy of changes in Iraq’s statistical reporting units between 2000 and the present. 

Crop data

Explore our crop data.

View our documentation on using the Crop Domain.

Crop estimate data sources

The Central Statistics Organization (CSO), in the Ministry of Planning is the single source of crop statistics for the country. 

The department of the CSO which provides crop data is the Authority of Statistics and Geographic Information Systems.  According to their website:

The Directorate designs and implements periodic and annual statistical surveys in the agricultural sector (plant and animal) to estimate the production of agricultural crops, vegetables, fruit trees, palm trees and their numbers, and livestock and fisheries surveys to estimate the numbers of livestock and their products, poultry farms and fishing. It also conducts field studies to calculate the cost of producing primary and secondary crops and provide indicators on the means of production in the agricultural sector through agricultural censuses and periodic surveys such as the agricultural mechanization survey and the water resources report issued by the Directorate in cooperation with the Ministry of Water Resources and the socio-economic survey of rural households. It also works on issuing periodic indicators on the prices of field products for plant production and production and marketing costs, in addition to designing and implementing the agricultural census in accordance with international recommendations. Some important indicators are not produced at the level of detailed administrative units, but rather remain general at the country level.

The country’s annual agricultural statistics are divided into two sections: temporary crops and permanent crops (largely tree crops). In the Temporary crops section, annual crop data reports at the Governorate-level are available in Arabic for the following:

• Wheat and barley

• Rice and sunflower

• Cotton, maize and potato

• Secondary crops and vegetables

Tabular data are provided in both Arabic and English.  A separate annual report series, “Crop and Vegetable Production Synthesis” provides national-level data only.  

A final menu choice in the Temporary section, entitled Tables in English, provides all tabular crop statistic data found in the previous sections, without the report narratives that accompany the data. This Tables section is sometimes more complete and current than in the other sections.

The Ministry of Agriculture provides technical assistance and coordination of the country’s agricultural resources.

Crop reporting units

Iraq’s crop data is primarily reported at the Admin 1-level, and crop statistics for Iraq are available in the FDW covering a period running roughly from 2010 to 2023. 

Year and season definition

The annual agricultural year (or cropping year) runs roughly between October 1 and September 30 of the next year. The year as a whole is often referred to by the year in which most of the harvests occur.  Most often, the year is described with a single-year notation.

Example: The agricultural year running from October 1, 2022 - September 30, 2023 would be referred to as 2023.

The important wheat and barley crops are generally planted in the winter season (2022 in the example) and harvested in the next year (2023 in the example). The spring, summer and autumn crops are planted and harvested in the same year (2023 in the example).

Primary crops

The principal food crops grown in the country are wheat, barley, maize, rice, beans, and sunflower seed (especially for cooking oil extraction).

The principal commercial crops grown include dates and cotton.  

Production systems

Annual crop statistics for Iraq often broken out by five different production systems (PS): 

1. All (PS)

2. Rainfed (PS)

3. Irrigated (PS)

4. Greenhouse (PS), often referred to as covered in official statistical reporting

5. Open-field (PS), non-greenhouse grown

Generally, Greenhouse crops are grown in the winter, and Open-field crops are common in the summer. Open-field (PS) crops are far more common than Greenhouse (PS) crops. The Open-field (PS) identifier is only used when Greenhouse and Open-field crops are both present in one of these seasons.

Crop statistics context

Due to variety of national and regional conflicts, crop data in various Governorates of the country is spotty. This is especially true in the four northern Kurdish-majority governorates, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, and Halabja. But it is also true of neighboring and agriculturally-important Ninevah and Salad Al-Din. Determining the cause of the missing data - due to conflict, or to major episodes of drought in which reporting was suspended - is not possible here.

Like several other countries in the general region, Iraq uses a dunum as its basic unit of area in agricultural applications. However, in Iraq the dunam is equivalent to .25 of a hectare, whereas it is .1 hectare (often called a decare) in most other countries. 

Methodology

The Agricultural Statistics Directorate issues an annual report on the production of secondary crops and vegetables, including crops that are grown for more than one season during the year, such as vegetables grown in summer and in greenhouses for winter crops in the same year, such as tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and others. This report includes indicators on the cultivated area, average productivity, and production of various secondary crops and vegetables at the governorate level. The governorates of the Kurdistan Region are often not included. 

Crop Estimation Report Methodology, per the Agricultural Statistics Directorate (translated from the Arabic original)

The method of direct inquiry from farmers about the area planted with crops is used to prepare the sample frame for crop estimates for the winter and summer seasons. This occurs after the completion of the seeding operations and the start of the germination process for the crops, in cooperation and coordination with the Ministry of Agriculture. As for the average productivity, it is estimated during the crop marketing period using a systematic sampling method to ensure the sample covers farmers in each administrative unit in the district. The field teams conduct a site visit to each selected farmer in the middle of the marketing period to inquire about the average productivity of the crops that were planted in the relevant season. This average is reached in terms of the observed cultivated area and the amount of marketed production. The interviews also form the basis to calculate area and production figures at the district level. Dunam-level yields are weighted averages calculated at the governorate level using the areas and weights of the production achieved in each district.