Tammuz Organisation for Social Development (TOSD) plans to carry out a series of training courses for the monitoring of parliamentary elections and provincial council elections over the coming days in Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaneya. TOSD asks you to kindly nominate people who are considered suitable for such training as professional, independent workers. For more information and registration of individuals please email or telephone 07704619000.

A recent training course aimed at improving wheat breeding in Iraq, and Kurdistan in particular, brought together participants from Basrah, the Ministry of Agriculture, Baghdad, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources (MOAWR) in Erbil, Sulimanya, Duhok, and Garmyan. The five-day course, held in Erbil from 1 to 5 September 2013, introduced participants to the fundamentals of wheat breeding. The cost of importing wheat can be prohibitive for countries such as Iraq that are recovering from conflict. The Ministry of Agriculture and HSAD partners have identified wheat as one of the strategic commodities critical to Iraq’s food security. This means that national agricultural scientists need to breed drought and disease resistant wheat varieties that can produce good yields under…

Ineffective seed legislation and strategies are perceived as one of the most significant barriers to improving food security and agricultural production in Iraq. Reforms are desperately needed to establish standards related to the production, registration, and dissemination of seeds – thereby improving the limited access that farmers currently have to improved varieties. Improved varieties of seed are a key component of efforts to strengthen food security and raise productivity in Iraq: they can raise yields, resist disease, and tolerate debilitating conditions such as salinization and drought. Although Iraq’s Ministry of Agriculture recognizes the importance of improved seed, its efforts to enhance distribution and strengthen farmer access are undermined by an ineffective regulatory and policy regime. Faced with enormous capacity constraints,…

Shams Network has released another new report (among a series of reports on the KRG elections) documenting the violations during the KRG elections that were held on 21 September 2013. The full report is attched in English.

The network issued its initial monitoring report of the KRG voting day, and it included observations about the process and the positive points that dominated the airspace, and the negative points that accompanied them along with the recommendations of the network. The Full report is attached (in Arabic).

The Shams Netwrok NGO, which operates in the KRG region in northern Iraq, has released a preliminary report on the state of the voting environment in the KRG before the elections. Full report is attached in Arabic