Three Decades of War and Food Insecurity in Iraq

Iraq has suffered more than three decades of near-continuous war and instability, affecting its food security. Our objectives were to assess whether cultivated area in central Iraq, as estimated using Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery, changed during and as a result of three decades of war and sanctions, and to determine which period of conflict experienced the greatest change. We created multi-temporal features of maximum normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) per pixel and used decision tree analysis to classify pixels with high maximum NDVI as cultivated. Validation with higher resolution imagery showed a 94 percent overall classification accuracy and a kappa statistic of 0.88. The results indicated that cultivated area changed little between the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988) and the Gulf War (1990 to 1991), increased by 20 percent (from 1.72 to 2.04 Mha) during the period of United Nations sanctions (1990 to 2003), and dropped to below pre-sanction levels during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003 to 2011).