Teams of WSU faculty and graduate students were sent to the Middle East five times in the past 18 months to educate Iraqis and help them revamp the war-torn nation’s agricultural system.

The five teams held training sessions in countries surrounding Iraq, such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt, because of safety issues caused by the Iraq war, said Rich Koenig, a professor in the department of Crop and Soil Sciences.

The teams focused on dry land cropping systems, a strength of the WSU agricultural system, Koenig said. These systems, used in areas with minimal rainfall, use no irrigation during production.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture supported the teams with a $5.3 million grant, as part of its Agricultural Extension Revitalization Project.

Along with five other universities, WSU sent groups of three to four people to teach Iraqis involved in agriculture about sustainability practices and modern agricultural technologies, Koenig said. He said it’s necessary for scientists to travel to the area to ensure Iraqi agricultural independence.

“That whole infrastructure that supported agriculture was really fragmented and doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s kind of like the teach a person to fish (analogy).” One team, which traveled to Jordan in June, focused on Iraqi women in agriculture and taught them plot gardening and how to correctly handle food.

“We found so far (women) don’t own farms or manage them, but they do help them,” said Rita Abi-Ghanem, a doctoral student in crop and soil sciences who went on three of the trips as a translator and teacher. “If they own land, it’s hereditary.” The teams taught Iraqi women about sustainability as a concept and global climate change, said Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Biologically-Intensive Agriculture and Organic Farming coordinator at the WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Koenig said the Iraqis were appreciative of WSU’s training efforts.

“We didn’t detect any animosity from the group,” he said. “People are people and they are struggling.” Carpenter-Boggs said she felt a sense of acceptance. She said some of the women lived in terrible conditions, but others were hardly affected.

“We were all amazed at how quickly we made friends with the Iraqi women,” she said. “The conditions are highly variable from city to city.” The trips to the Middle East were Phase I of the Agricultural Extension Revitalization Project. WSU professors and scientists will begin and complete Phase II of the project next year.

Phase II will bring Iraqi administrators to the U.S. They will get a close look at how the university and extension programs work within the U.S.