Wheat subsidies in Jordan may be too little too late
The Jordanian government is trying to encourage domestic production after purchasing 97% of its wheat on the international market last year.
AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s Cabinet on July 14 agreed to raise the price that the government pays for local farmers' wheat from 425 Jordanian dinars ($600) to 450 dinars ($635) per metric ton (2,205 pounds). After months of campaigning by domestic producers and the Ministry of Agriculture, the Cabinet took a long overdue step to boost the country’s wheat production.
Besides offsetting rising costs of wheat seeds, the government also hopes to boost local output by paying far more than the international market price ($286), with “the ultimate goal of helping wheat farmers,” Agriculture Ministry spokesman Nimer Haddadin told Al-Monitor in an interview.
Experts say that although the policy is a step in the right direction, it may have come too late. Farmers in the wheat-growing north, who have faced increasing losses over the last five years because of poor harvests, droughts and decreased trade due to the Syrian crisis, also remain skeptical.
Abu Ibrahim, 82, has been growing wheat on his family’s farm near the northern town of Ramtha since Jordan’s independence in 1946. He remembers when the country had no need for imported wheat, “when towns were dotted with communal mills and bakeries and farmers could make a decent living.” In the 1980s, Jordan had nearly 2 million dunams (200,000 hectares) of rain-fed agriculture dedicated to wheat and barley. By 2000, it was 300,000 dunams (30,000 hectares). Today, Abu Ibrahim estimates that “only 50,000 dunams” are cultivated with wheat, “and it will soon be far less.”
