Corruption, theft tied to shortage of food rations

BAGHDAD -- After his American employers left, and monthly food rations began to shrink, Hussein Hadi started selling his furniture. His bed was the last to go.

Now Hadi, his wife, sister, mother, two brothers, three children, and a nephew sleep on his living room floor, their blankets sewn from flour sacks.

Some nights, they fall asleep hungry. ''Hope is small," said his wife, Zainab.

Like many Iraqis, the Hadis depend on food rations distributed by the government. Sometimes the sugar they receive has been hardened by rainwater and the rice is crawling with maggots. The soap is so harsh that it causes rashes. When the Hadis receive all the items -- sugar, rice, flour, baby milk, tea, vegetable oil, and a few other essentials -- they consider themselves lucky.

The UN World Food Program, which monitors the distribution of rations, recently reported ''significant countrywide shortages of rice, sugar, milk, and infant formula." Families in Baghdad haven't received sugar or baby milk since January. Newspapers have also begun reporting that the tea and flour handouts contain metal filings and that people have fallen ill after consuming food rations.

''We have doubts, but we're afraid," said Mulkia Salman, 60, Hadi's widowed mother. ''They give us these items, but they tell us not to use them."

Officials with the Trade Ministry, which is in charge of distributing the rations, said the media have created the crisis. But they have refused to release results of the tests for contamination they said they are doing.

Retail agents who sell the food baskets say the ministry is corrupt, a charge supported by Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the government's anticorruption chief. Radhi said in a recent interview that Trade Ministry officials had spread rumors about contaminated food to discredit the current flour supplier and renegotiate the contract.

Some agents speculate that ministry employees have added metal filings to cheat on the parcels' weight. The same employees also sell tea and flour on the black market, agents say.

Like the Hadis, many Iraqi families rely on the heavily subsidized rations, which were previously distributed under the United Nations' oil-for-food program to mitigate the effect of sanctions after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the program was handed over to the Ministry of Trade.

More than half of Iraq's population lives below the poverty line. The country's median income fell from $255 in 2003 to about $144 in 2004, according to a recent UN survey.

Families buy the food baskets for a few dollars at special statelicensed shops.

Ahmed Mukhtar, director general of the ministry, blamed the shortage of rations on security threats that created bottlenecks at the borders with Jordan, Syria, and Turkey.

''We're attempting to make sure the supplies are safely delivered," Mukhtar said. ''Anything that disturbs the food supplies is a critical situation."

Zainab Hadi said she and other women have been forced to buy food at the market, pushing prices up. The cost of tea and flour has almost tripled. At local food markets, a 35-pound can of vegetable oil, which just a few months ago cost $4, a little more than an average day's wage, now costs $12.

In the Hadis' tiny cinderblock house, 10 family members share two rooms.

For a year after the fall of Baghdad, Hadi and his brothers ran electrical wire and made friends with Americans in the nearby Green Zone, which serves as the US headquarters in Iraq. One of his brothers present in the house pulled out a photocopied picture of him and other Iraqis smiling as they stand beside Army Brigadier General Mark T. Kimmitt, the spokesman for US-led forces in Iraq at the time.

After Kimmitt and other soldiers ended their deployment, the Hadi brothers were dismissed. They wanted to work for the arriving troops but were turned away. The interpreters who control the hiring of other Iraqis behind the scenes wanted bribes that the family could not afford, they said.

One brother applied for a job with the Iraq National Guard. But they also wanted money: $500 to consider hiring him as a recruit.

Since then, the brothers have worked sporadically as minibus drivers. They are paid about $3 a day to ferry passengers around the capital and brave suicide bombers.

''The food basket is shrinking, and the people's hopes are also shrinking," said Amir Huseini, who dealt with social issues in an office affiliated with the anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. ''These one or two missing items have become three, four, and five, until this point when the really vital item -- the flour -- is also missing."