Agriculture Employment and Economic Growth in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

The Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) is naturally blessed with agriculturally fertile land areas, water supplies, and favorable weather. However, the region’s agricultural sector substantially declined due to the first Gulf War and the subsequent embargo period. In KRI, the agriculture industry is undiversified, production costs are high, and there is no clear policy protecting domestic producers. Aside from the difficulties farmers have in gaining access to markets, financing, and supplies, food production needs to compete with imported items with generally cheaper pricing. Turkey and Iran, whose goods have filled Iraqi markets, are the primary competitors for Kurdish farmers. KRG’s inability to design an effective homegrown national food supply policy and business people’s greed and use of food import and distribution as a channel of money laundering effectively marginalized the agriculture sector. The radical reforms in trade, production, distribution, and employment are unavoidable due to the contribution of agriculture to GDP, the expansion of the service industry, the advancement of digital technologies, the enhancement of capital formation, and the increase in the skilled workforce. The economic growth strategies for Iraqi Kurdistan include two main goals: employment generation and the reduction of revenue inequity. This study assesses how the agriculture industry contributes to achieving these goals. A mixed method technique is used to collect and analyze data on agricultural production, agriculture added value to the GDP, and the number of farmers as unbalanced panel data for the years 2012, 2013, and 2018 have been employed to analyze a wider range of data and get a better result. Pooled OLS, fixed-effects, and random-effects techniques were used to estimate the relations between GDP growth and agriculture employment in the region. Findings demonstrate that although the agricultural industry has a strong capability of producing jobs and wealth, quality concerns are required for agriculture to promote productivity and employment and provide higher food security.