In a report on March 25, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and Food Quality said that the agriculture team of the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Erbil had brought together farmers from Duhok and Halabja in a recent seminar.

Dairy Farmers and Industry from Halabja and Duhok meet in a seminar on Animal Health #Agrobericht https://t.co/oRQb2W1IWF

— NL-Irak Agri (@AgroIrak) March 25, 2024

The event on February 1 marked the closure of two rounds of farmer field school activities, one in the spring in Halabja and the other in the autumn in Duhok, the Ministry said.

In these farmer field school sessions, farmers concluded that specific diseases were hard to deal with and that access to good veterinary services and medication might require closer collaboration. Moreover, they created a WhatsApp group to exchange information.

At the seminar, two experts gave presentations on how to manage animal health and how to breed livestock. Lively discussions and many questions followed. Government officials, private company representatives, experts, researchers, and farmers were present at the events. 

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources Karim Sulaiman opened the meeting and expressed his gratitude to the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Erbil for their collaborative efforts. 

He highlighted the importance of such initiatives as a significant opportunity to bring relevant stakeholders closer together, as well as to enhance the livestock sector in the Kurdistan Region and strengthen the economic ties between the Kurdistan Region and the Netherlands.

“The main objective of the event was to foster a networking environment for dairy farmers who had participated in previous rounds of the farmer field school activities in Duhok and Halabja governorates. The event also provided an informative session on animal health and served as a space to connect farmers with other stakeholders,” Hoshang Kanabi Hamad, Agriculture Advisor at the Netherlands Consulate General in Erbil, told Kurdistan Chronicle.

“Over the past few years, several small to medium-sized collaborative projects have been established by Kurdish and Dutch companies. In addition, several large Kurdish companies have decided to enter the dairy industry in line with KRG efforts to diversify its economy,” he added.

“Therefore, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Erbil wants to actively engage in this subsector by facilitating cooperation and knowledge exchange between farmers, as well as promoting sustainable dairy production in the Kurdistan Region.”

Read More: Erbil Safe to Visit for Dutch Entrepreneurs: Consul General

In an interview on March 4, the Consul General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Erbil Jaco Beerends told Kurdistan Chronicle that private sector development is an important part of the diversification strategy of the KRG, and that the Netherlands advocates “for Dutch companies to come and conduct their business in the Kurdistan Region.”

Read More: Potato Revolution

An example of Dutch-Kurdish agricultural cooperation is the Kurdistan-Holland (KH) Company for Agricultural Investments, established in 2009, which has managed to reshape Kurdistan’s agribusiness landscape by increasing its potato production from 2,000 tons to 650,000 tons with the help of Dutch expertise and potato seeds.

Bashar Mushir Goran, the CEO of KH Company, earlier told Kurdistan Chronicle that the expansion of potato cultivation has “created job opportunities for over 40,000 unemployed

individuals.”

Moreover, these potatoes have been exported to countries like the UAE. “Kurdistan potatoes are the best potatoes in the Middle East in terms of quality,” Goran explained.