Planting Seeds Of Hope In Iraq
Ed Price knows all about that crop. Part of it is for eating. The rest is seed potatoes for the big planting next fall.
As head of Texas A & M University's institute for international agriculture, Price has traveled to Iraq many times in the years since Baghdad fell. He's tracked planting cycles for tomatoes and maize. He can tell you what it's like to drive from the Turkish border to Irbil in the springtime – "all you can see is wheat and barley crops."
It's not well known, but while the Pentagon was preparing to surge troops into Baghdad, it was also signing a cooperative agreement with Price to put together his own kind of surge. Next week he travels to Iraq with a team of agriculture specialists to create – of all things – an extension service, much like the extension service that "has been the backbone of agriculture development in the United States" for a hundred years.
Back in the early, less violent, days after the US invasion, Price would go out on his own to take a taxi to Baghdad University to meet with Iraqi scientists. "There was tremendous rapport," he says. "We were doing a good thing by providing them with hope."
On this trip he won't be grabbing his own cabs. Traveling around Iraq now, he says, "is scary, no question about it." But Price is going anyway, drawing inspiration from the graduates of A & M who are serving in Iraq. "I need to complement their effort and build on what they're doing." Building the peace by building agriculture, he says.
Yup, he even sees an Iraqi version of the 4-H Club. He's determined to win the trust of Iraqi colleagues, get them to win over farmers, earn respect from communities and then change lives with jobs, food and leadership programs.
Before you dismiss it as a pipe dream, consider where Price is coming from – the Norman E. Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture, named for the man who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments as the "father of the green revolution." Borlaug worked all over the world producing breakthrough wheat harvests and feeding millions. His motto: "Peace cannot be built on empty stomachs."
We can all only hope his protégé Ed Price finds such fertile fields in Iraq.