For the first time in six months, Iraqis are to receive their full food rations under Baghdad's oil-for-food deal with the United Nations, a UN official said yesterday. Mr Eric Falt, spokesman for the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Mr Denis Halliday, said the basic food basket, which includes flour, rice, sugar, pulses and baby milk, would be topped up by government supplies to reach the agreed target levels.
The government will also dig into its own reserves for the first time to help feed the three virtually autonomous Kurdish provinces in northern Iraq.
The distribution of the food will be monitored by UN staff, including 57 personnel who returned to Baghdad on Thursday night. They were evacuated last week to escape the threat of US air strikes over the row about weapons inspections in Iraq.
Under the so-called oil-for-food accord Iraq has been allowed since December 1996 to sell $2 billion of oil every six months and to use most of the proceeds to buy food and medicine needed for its population, suffering under seven years of tough economic sanctions.
Last week, the Security Council approved raising the ceiling of Iraqi oil sales, under the plan, to $5.256 billion every six months.
UN staff monitor government distribution in central and southern provinces which are under Baghdad's control. In the north, where the UN is solely responsible for distribution, the government has not previously been involved.
Iraq has complained that US and British representatives on the UN sanctions committee in New York have consistently blocked its contracts for purchases, forcing it to cut rations in the past.
Mr Halliday - who was born in Dublin - cut back UN work outside Baghdad and sent around 60 personnel to the safety of neighbouring Jordan last week.
"Other people will be coming back in the next four or five days and I think we will be in very good shape in the first week of March," Mr Halliday, a TCD graduate, said. But Iraq, which considers the oil-for-food accord a poor substitute for the full lifting of sanctions imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, has yet to give its approval to the increase in volume.
It says it cannot pump over $4 billion of oil every six months for the time being anyway, because of damage to its oil industry from war and sanctions.