By MATTHEW HAY BROWN
The Hartford Courant
October 22, 2000

BAGHDAD, Iraq

The woman, who will identify herself only as "Um Amjed" - the mother of Amjed - hands the slips of paper to the shopkeeper at the al-Khateeb market, a small, dusty storefront on a narrow side street in the working-class al-Sha'ab neighborhood of Baghdad. The shopkeeper looks at the government coupons and begins hefting white sacks of grain from the shelves.

It's ration night for Um Amjed's family of five, when they pick up their monthly allotment of flour, rice, lentils and other staples purchased by the government with proceeds from the sale of oil. As 13-year-old Amjed loads the sacks into a rusting wheelbarrow, his mother says they will not be enough to feed the family.

"We need more rice, more cooking oil," she says. "We need protein - eggs, red meat, chicken. We need vegetables."

With the few dollars her husband made this month as a day laborer, Um Amjed will walk next to the Souk al-Sha'ab, the vast open market around the corner, to supplement the ration as best she can. This is the U.N. oil-for-food program: a lifeline for millions of families in a country where more than half the population has dropped below the poverty line, but still not enough to prevent widespread malnutrition, disease and death.

"It's a very important program," says Hans von Sponeck, who resigned as U.N. coordinator for humanitarian aid to Iraq earlier this year in protest of the sanctions. "At the same time, it's a very inadequate program."

"It's designed to be inadequate," says von Sponeck's predecessor, Denis Halliday, who resigned the post in 1998 also in protest of the sanctions. "It was designed to stop further deterioration of the situation. At the time, the situation was high child mortality, massive malnutrition, social collapse and so on. So if it was designed to stop further deterioration, it was designed also to sustain the situation that already existed."

Introduced in late 1996, the program allowed the government of Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil at market price and use about two-thirds of the proceeds for food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies approved by the U.N. Security Council.

Nutrition in Iraq has improved since the monthly food rations began in early 1997, but calorie and protein intake remain far below pre-sanctions levels, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In southern and central Iraq, nearly one in 10 children under 5 is wasting from acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF. More than one in five is stunted from chronic malnutrition.

Food shortages are only part of the problem. Under sanctions that limit replacement equipment for treatment plants bombed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, much of the water supply now is contaminated with human waste. Dysentery and gastroenteritis are epidemic; the sick are unable to retain nutrients.

"It's poverty, not lack of food, that is the real reason behind most malnutrition in the world," says retired University of Massachusetts Professor Peter Pellett, who has studied nutrition in Iraq for the Food and Agriculture Organization. "And what are sanctions, but artificial poverty?"

Since the oil-for-food program began, the Security Council has lifted the limit on the amount of oil Iraq may sell and has expanded the list of goods it may buy to include equipment and supplies for the country's sanitation, power, agriculture, communications and education systems.

But delivery is slowed by a council review process to ensure Iraq is not importing goods that could also be used by the military, and the amount of aid is limited by how much oil Iraq's aging petroleum industry infrastructure can pump.

"The oil-for-food program is no substitute for the resumption of normal economic activity in Iraq," says Benon Sevan, director of the U.N. Office of the Iraq Programme. "However, there is no doubt the situation for many in that country is significantly better than it was when the first oil was exported under the program at the end of 1996."

Through August, Iraq had sold oil worth $35.751 billion, had received $8.692 billion in goods and been approved for $6.364 billion more. Estimates of the cost of rebuilding Iraq's public infrastructure begin at $100 billion.