ANALYZING THE POSITION OF RICE FARMERS FROM THE RESULTS OF IMPLEMENTING AGRICULTURAL POLICY IN IRAQ USING A LIKERT SCALE

Abstract

agricultural legislation and the variables affecting compliance with those legislation, as well as knowing the role of agricultural legislation in supporting the steps of agricultural policy in Iraq. The results showed that with regard to the question related to the lack of agricultural loans, 77.6% of farmers considered it an important issue. As for the questions of weak support for production inputs prices and weak support for final output prices, their answers were very similar with the word “agree” with 79.90 and 81.32% of the sample’s answers to questions (14) and (15), respectively. With regard to the answers to the question dealing with the decrease in water quotas, it was shown that the answers of the sample members were homogeneous and agreed with a percentage of 79.19% that it was one of the most important problems they suffer from. The research concluded that the amount of government support provided to production requirements for the cultivation of the crop does not achieve the farmer's goal in reducing production costs and that the contribution of this support is weak relative to the total costs of production requirements. In addition, despite the fact that the state sets the purchase price of the crop at prices that exceed international prices for it, it is considered unrewarding compared to the high production costs in Iraq. The research recommended the need for an honest supervisory body that works to ensure that farmers do not violate the imposed governmental legislation in order to regulate production and develop the agricultural sector, as well as work to improve the reality of agricultural production by providing government support for the use of modern technologies to increase production rates per unit area and achieve greater returns for farmers.Keywords: Likert scale, subsidy policy, agricultural loans* Part of Ph.D Dissertation of 1st author