SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Iraqi Commission of Human Rights warned on Monday of risks threatening food security in the country due to measures taken by the federal government, including devaluation of the dinar.
Member of Iraq’s Commission of Human Rights Anas Akram called on the federal government to take practical measures to restore the food balance to the groups of society affected by the high prices of commodities and foodstuffs.
“There are groups in Iraqi society that are more affected by the increase in the dollar’s exchange rate and its negative consequences for the rise in commodity and food prices by 14%, which constitutes a serious threat to national security food and double poverty levels and doubles poverty levels,” Akram said in an interview with Iraq’s state newspaper Sabah.
In December, Iraq’s Central Bank increased the sale price of U.S. dollars to banks and currency exchange to 1,460 Iraqi dinars, from 1,182 IQD, seeking to compensate for a decline in oil revenue due to low crude prices.
The central bank of Iraq said the key reason behind the dinar’s devaluation was to close the gap of widened 2021 budget inflation after a collapse in global oil prices, a major source of Iraq’s financial resources.
Iraq depends on oil revenue for 95 percent of its income. The last devaluation was in December 2015 when it raised the sale price of U.S. dollars to 1,182 dinars from 1,166.
But in Iraq’s largely dollar-denominated economy, lowering the value of its dinar by a significant rate, which was the highest devaluation rate since 2003, has raised the price of goods, hitting living standards.
The member of the Iraqi human rights commission stressed that the federal government needed to deal “seriously and professionally” with the report of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).
In January, WFP representative in Iraq Abdulrahman Mejaj said about three million Iraqis were not consuming enough food.
“About 3 million people in Iraq suffer from insufficient food consumption, and this includes 731,000 food-insecure IDPs and returnees,” Abdulrahman Mejaj said.
WFP’s Hunger Monitoring System found in November 2020 that around 2.6 million people – roughly seven percent of Iraq’s total population – had “insufficient levels of food consumption”.
