The Americans came in the summer with suitcases full of dollars and bought the wheat harvest from miles around. Farmer Faleh Abbas walked away from the sale pleased with the price and pleased that his hard work would help feed his people.
But very little of the wheat he and his colleagues grew ended up as food.
Some was stored in silos, some was processed as feed for livestock. The rest was trucked away to be burned and buried.
Officials of the U.S.-led occupation authority said they felt they had to buy the Iraqi wheat because the nation's 5 million agricultural workers, roughly half the labor force, had come to expect such help after decades of living in a largely socialist state. But the officials worried that some of the grain was of such low quality that it would gum up the mills and couldn't be used for bread. So they destroyed it.
The gap in the food supply was made up with $190 million worth of wheat from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, courtesy of the U.S. government.
How food will be produced and distributed in the new Iraq is among the biggest challenges the interim authority faces as it tries to reform the slew of state-run or state-subsidized industries that existed under the previous government.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis depended on subsidies and handouts as a way of life. The Coalition Provisional Authority is determined to change that and create a capitalist economy where the state provides little, if any, support, except to the neediest.
As security has continued to be a problem, the authority has had to back away from some of its earlier plans. It gave seeds to farmers as it had hoped not to, and delayed a plan to replace monthly food rations with credits. But it continues to maintain that laissez faire is the future of the country.
"It's been hugely paternalistic here based on the misguided belief that if you [subsidize] them, farmers would produce. But when you give everything for nothing, people don't appreciate it," said Trevor Flugge, an Australian who until recently was the authority's senior civil administrator for agriculture.
In the old Iraq, the state provided seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, sprinklers, tractors and other necessities to farmers at a low cost, often a third or even a fourth of the market price. It leased land for 1 cent per donam, about six-tenths of an acre, a year. It bought the country's main crops, wheat and barley, at a fixed price, whether they were usable or not. And it ground up the grain and handed it out as flour to the people free. Each month, every family received a basket of flour, sugar, tea and other necessities.
Occupation authority officials are debating whether the subsidies to Iraqi farmers will continue and, if so, for how long. Much of the argument, one agriculture adviser said, is between the "the economists" and "the military," with the economists wanting laissez faire as soon as possible and the military worried that yanking subsidies too soon could lead to social unrest, which would further destabilize the country.
Since the end of the war, the United Nations has taken the lead on food, and the system remained pretty much the same. But in November, it transferred to the CPA control of the program that allowed Iraq to exchange oil for food and other essential supplies when sanctions were in effect.
The authority inherited $3 billion from the program. What it does with the money will be closely watched by the rest of the world because the United States and Australia, the two countries taking the lead on rehabilitating the Iraqi agriculture sector, are also the two leading exporters of wheat. Their farmers could benefit from the shape of Iraq's agricultural industry.
Abbas is a farmer just like his father and his father's father, going back as far as anyone can remember. He lives on a 30-donam plot southeast of Baghdad in the country's heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a place of winter wheat and date palms, where lines of cows and sheep wander as they please.
The land is legendary for its bounty, the subject of passages in the Koran and countless poems. Oil may have been the muscle behind Iraq's economy, but agriculture, while accounting for only about 6 percent of the gross national product, was the country's soul.
So it was especially painful for farmers when Hussein's government cut down trees and drained the swamps a dozen years ago after the Persian Gulf War. It invested little in irrigation, and the network fell into disrepair, leaving the already salty land even saltier.
That was part of the reason Iraq, which as recently as the 1950s was self-sufficient in agriculture, was forced to import more and more food. The sanctions imposed after the 1991 war meant that Iraq had to import more than half its food supply.
But farmers were all but guaranteed a comfortable, if not luxurious, life. Even the smallest farms could produce an income of $3,000 a year. Many government workers, soldiers and teachers made less than $100 a year.
A single season's harvest was plenty to support Abbas, 30, his wife and three children; his brother, Saleh Abbas, 39, his wife and their three children; and his father and mother.
"People were making so much money that the incentive to work harder, to increase production -- it wasn't there," said Salam Iskender, the new head of the agriculture section for the Wasit governorate, which includes Kut.
As a result, the yield in some regions plummeted from one ton of wheat per donam to a third of that and, particularly in the past two years, a large percentage of the crop came up "black," meaning it couldn't be eaten.
Of the 1.25 million tons, or $118 million worth, of wheat the occupation authority purchased last summer, a third was inedible, according to a U.N. report.
The CPA hopes to break the cycle of dependence. The idea is that reducing subsidies will force farmers to invest more of their own money and have more of a stake in the outcome of their crops, providing the foundation for a capitalist economy the authority hopes will blossom after it departs in July.
"In fixing electricity, you can build a powerhouse and the problem is solved. But in agriculture you have to change the culture, and you don't do that overnight," Flugge said.
Abbas and other farmers say they are somewhat baffled by what they have heard about the coming free economy.
When he first visited the agriculture office for his governorate after the 2003 war, he found the doors smashed and the windows in pieces. The staff was gone. All the tractors, plows, chemicals and other materials that had been stored for the next planting season had disappeared.
Abbas managed to cobble together enough money to buy what he needed to harvest the summer wheat and take it to the state silo. To his relief, the authorities agreed to buy it, but it was only a temporarily reprieve.
In October, he heard from fellow farmers that the U.S.-led administration would provide only a small amount of fertilizer and pesticides this year -- and nothing else. (The occupation authority later decided it would also give seeds to farmers.) And in the near future, the government would provide no subsidies at all and it wouldn't promise to buy all the wheat.
"We are afraid of the free economy. We don't understand it. If we grow crops, who will help us and who will buy it?" Abbas said.
Mohammed Abdul Hussein, director of the Kut chapter of the General Federation of Iraqi Farmers, said reduction of subsidies will force people to abandon agriculture. "If the government will not supply seeds and fertilizer, the farmers, they will not farm," he said
CPA officials say they are confident that won't happen. In fact, they say they have a plan to make life even better for farmers.
The U.S. Agency for International Development awarded a contract, worth as much as $40 million, in October to Bethesda-based Development Alternatives Inc. It is designed to revitalize the agriculture sector by providing training in marketing and food processing, and by offering micro-loans.
The target is an increase of at least 20 percent in the production of grains, a 50 percent increase in profits for 1,000 commercial companies and a doubling of productivity for 30,000 farm families.
Flugge said the strategy that aid groups have used for years -- providing farmers with supplies -- is all wrong. He said the new government instead will provide help in the form of technology and education and that "the market" will take care of the rest. His goal is a farming sector modeled after the American one, which is subsidized on outputs, rather than inputs.
To that end, the authority will stop paying for supplies, but will pay more for wheat. "We are trying to redirect support for agriculture," said Lloyd Harbert, an American who is a senior CPA adviser assigned to the ministry of agriculture.
The ministry of agriculture has recommended a price of $140 a ton for the next harvest, up from $105 a ton. The idea is to encourage farmers to increase the quality and yields of their crops so they'll make more money.
Even those who understand and believe in the CPA's vision of a capitalist market for agriculture worry that if there truly is an open market, the local family farmers who dominate the sector here will not be able to compete. Foreign agribusinesses that mass-produce commodities such as wheat will dominate, they fear.
Before the war, Iraq was Australia's third-largest market for wheat. Iraq also imported grains from India and Russia. The CPA agreed to honor the contracts signed by the Hussein regime.
The fact that the authority imported U.S. wheat after the war as it destroyed Iraqi wheat has made some question potential conflicts of interest facing those trying to help Iraq. "Will U.S. and Australians coming help develop and improve agriculture or create competition?" said Ahmed Hayder Zubaidi, the dean of the College of Agriculture at Baghdad University.
Esmail Hussain Ahmed, the head of the farmers union in Kurdistan, which was semi-independent and whose farming was less subsidized, said he's optimistic about capitalism in agriculture. But he believes the CPA is moving too quickly and that small farmers are not prepared for the global politics.
"We are like a child which stage by stage needs to grow up. . . . We need time," before becoming mature enough to compete with the rest of the world, Ahmed said.
As officials in Baghdad, Washington, Canberra and elsewhere debate issues that may determine his economic fate, Abbas worried about something simpler: when the rains will come.
As the planting season for wheat neared in November, Abbas was ready. He gathered some seeds left over from last year and used his rickety 1985 tractor to prepare the land. He purchased some fertilizer from the government -- at double the price he paid the year before -- and some more on the black market. Then he began the delicate process of planting 18 donams of wheat, five with onions, two with garlic and the rest with other vegetables. Now that he awaits the spring harvest, all there is left to do is pray.
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.