Trade Ministry begins food basket distribution with three-month stock

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Trade Ministry has begun distributing monthly food basket items to citizens and has enough stock to cover the program for the next three months, with deliveries expected to reach households before the end of the week.

Ahmed Ali Abdul Ridha, media director of the General Company for Foodstuff Trading, said allocation and distribution began on Saturday, July 4, and supplies are now being dispatched.

“It is expected that citizens will begin receiving the food basket items before the end of the week,” Abdul Ridha told the Iraqi News Agency.

He said there were no obstacles in the allocation and distribution operations or in the electronic point-of-sale payment process, and that the company held a stock of food basket materials sufficient for three months.

Abdul Ridha said the company had also prepared a monitoring plan, supervised by its director general and relevant department managers, to help distribution agents collect food basket items and to track deliveries to households against the scheduled timetable.

Iraq’s food basket is distributed through the Public Distribution System, commonly known as the ration card program, introduced in the 1990s to provide households with subsidized staples including flour, rice, sugar and cooking oil. The system remains one of the country’s largest social welfare programs, though the government recently reinstated a monthly income threshold of 1.5 million dinars (about $980) for eligibility and has continued updating beneficiary records through a nationwide digital registration system to remove ineligible recipients and improve distribution.