It’s not funded just by oil and looting. How the Islamic State uses agriculture.
The Islamic State has repeatedly made headlines for commandeering and profiting from the region’s oil. Less attention has been paid to its use of another resource vital to the functioning of any would-be state: agriculture. The Islamic State does not publish agricultural statistics. So how can we measure its agricultural production and potential revenue streams? […]Eckart Woertz and Hadi Jaafar write for The Washington Post:
The Islamic State has repeatedly made headlines for commandeering and profiting from the region’s oil. Less attention has been paid to its use of another resource vital to the functioning of any would-be state: agriculture. The Islamic State does not publish agricultural statistics. So how can we measure its agricultural production and potential revenue streams? How has the international campaign against the Islamic State impacted that vital economic sector?
In a recent article, we use an innovative method of interpreting satellite imagery to gauge agricultural production in Islamic State-controlled territory. We derive remotely sensed vegetation indices and correlate them with production in pre-conflict years based on government statistics. To isolate the impact of conflict from drought effects, we statistically control for rainfall. The results are striking: The Islamic State may be using and profiting from agriculture far more than previously estimated.
