Iraq On The Brink Of Chaos As Oil Revenues Fall
by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,
ZeroHedge.com
02/22/2016
During a sombre visit to Germany last week, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi urged the international community to help boost his country’s crisis economy in the face of plummeting crude oil prices, underscoring a desperate situation in which Iraq has lost 85 percent of its oil revenues.
Iraqi oil revenues have fallen to just 15 percent of what they used to be, the embattled prime minister said, despite a boost in production ordered last year.
The surge in production has failed to compensate for the collapse of oil prices, and the situation is dire when oil revenues constitute around 43 percent of Iraq’s gross domestic product (GDP), 99 percent of its exports and 90 percent of all federal revenues.
All told for this year, the Iraqi government expects to export 3.6 million barrels of oil per day (bopd).
Only last October, Iraq’s oil revenues were holding at about $40 billion, excluding the cost of oil production.
This has prompted the Al Abadi government to announce strict austerity measures across institutions, including significant salary cuts for middle-class government employees. Protest rallies were held against delayed salaries, which later turned violent in some parts of Iraq, including the Kurdistan region.
Under these circumstances, one must question the legitimacy of the deal Baghdad has now offered to the Iraqi Kurds.
Earlier this week, Baghdad extended an offer to pay the salaries of the KRG’s public employees in return for a halting of unilateral oil exports by the Kurds. Both sides need this deal. The KRG is struggling to pay salaries, and protests are mounting—threatening the stability of what was not long ago the only peaceful and secure place in all of Iraq.
But most significantly, both Baghdad and the KRG need to ensure that the Kurdish Peshmerga fighting forces are being paid, because this is the key bulwark against further Islamic State (ISIS) advancements in the disputed territories of northern Iraq, around Mosul and oil-rich Kirkuk.
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