BAGHDAD — After his American employers left, and monthly food rations began to shrink, Hussein Hadi started selling his furniture. His bed was the last thing to go.
Now Hadi, his wife, sister, mother, two brothers, three children and a nephew sleep on his living room floor in Baghdad, 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. On the rare occasions when the Hadis received all the items -- sugar, rice, flour, baby milk, tea, vegetable oil and a few other essentials -- they considered themselves lucky.
The U.N. World Food Program, which monitors the distribution of rations, recently reported "significant countrywide shortfalls in 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.
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 Radhi, the government's anti-corruption 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.
Frustration, Suspicion
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 U.N. survey. Families buy the food baskets for a few dollars at special state-licensed shops.
