The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers. When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased twenty-five chickens that morning specifically to kill for us. This was good news, a 100 percent jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.
The first step in Iraqi chicken killing was remarkably old. The plant had a small window, actually the single window in the whole place, that faced toward a parking lot and, way beyond that, Mecca. A sad, skinny man pulled a chicken out of a wire cage, showed it the parking lot, and then cut off its head. The man continued to grab, point, and cut twenty-five times. Soon twenty-five heads accumulated at his feet. The sharply bright red blood began to pool on the floor, floating the heads. It was enough to turn you vegan on the spot, swearing never to eat anything substantive enough to cast a shadow. The slasher did not appear to like or dislike his work. He looked bored. I kept expecting him to pull a carny sideshow grin or wave a chicken head at us, but he killed the chickens and then walked out. This appeared to be the extent of his job.
Once the executioner was done, the few other workers present started up the chicken-processing machinery, a long traveling belt with hooks to transport the chickens to and through the various processing stations, like the ultimate adventure ride. But instead of passing Cinderella’s castle and Tomorrowland, the tramway stopped at the boiler, the defeatherer, and the leg saw. First, it paused in front of an employee who took a dead chicken and hung it by its feet on a hook, launching it on its journey to the next station, where it was sprayed with pressurized steam. This loosened the feathers before the belt transported the carcasses to spinning brushes, like a car wash, that knocked the feathers off. Fluff and chicken water flew everywhere. One employee stood nearby picking up the birds knocked by the brushes to the floor. The man was showered with water and had feathers stuck to his beard. The tramway then guided the chickens up and over to the foot-cutting station, which generated a lot of bone dust, making breathing in the area unpleasant. The feet continued on the tramway sans torso, ultimately to be plucked off and thrown away by another man who got out of bed knowing that was what he would do with his day. The carcass itself fell into a large stainless steel tub, where someone with a long knife gutted it, slid the entrails down a drain hole, and pushed the body over to the final station, where a worker wrapped it in plastic. The process overall sounded like something from Satan’s kitchen, grinding, squeaking, and squealing in a helluva racket.
According to our press release, the key to the project was “market research which indicated Iraqis would be willing to pay a premium for fresh, halal-certified chicken, a market distinct from the cheaper imported frozen chicken found on Iraqi store shelves.” The only problem was that no one actually did any market research. In 2010, most Iraqis ate frozen chicken imported from Brazil. Those crafty Brazilians at least labeled the chicken as halal, and you could buy a kilo of the stuff for about 2,200 dinars ($1.88). Because Iraq did not grow whatever chickens ate, feed had to be imported, raising the price of local chicken. A live bird in the market went for about 3,000 dinars, while chicken from our plant, where we had to pay for the feed plus the workers and who knew what else, cost over 4,000 dinars, more than the already expensive live variety and almost double the price of cheap frozen imports. With the fresh-chicken niche market satisfied by the live birds you killed yourself at home and our processed chicken too expensive, our poultry plant stayed idle; it could not afford to process any chicken. There was no unfulfilled market for the fresh halal birds we processed. Nobody seemed to have checked into this before we laid out our $2.58 million.
The US Department of Agriculture representative from Baghdad visiting the plant with us said the solution was to spend more money: $20,000 to pay a contractor to get license plates for the four Hyundai trucks outside in the parking lot facing Mecca. Our initial grant did not include licensing the vehicles we bought. The trucks, he hoped, would someday transport chicken to somewhere there might be an actual market. Another Embassy colleague repeated the line that the plant was designed to create jobs in an area of chronic unemployment, which was good news for the chicken slasher but otherwise not much help. If employment was indeed the goal, why have an automated plant with the tramway of chicken death? Instead, fifty guys doing all the work by hand seemed like a better idea. A chubby third Embassy person who came to the plant for the day, huffing and puffing in body armor, said the goal was to put more protein into the food chain, which might have been an argument for a tofu factory or a White Castle.
How many PRT staff members does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hire a contractor who fails to complete the job and two to write the press release in the dark. We measured the impact of our projects by their effect on us, not by their effect on the Iraqis. Output was the word missing from the vocabulary of developing Iraq. Everything was measured only by what we put in—dollars spent, hours committed, people engaged, bees pressed on widows, press releases written. One team leader noted, “Numbers are at times more explicative than words. Being successful in Iraq often was consequent to the number of times ePRT members could have a hands-on approach to their work. Team Leader alone has been on 170 missions since January.” The poultry plant had a “business plan,” but it did not mention where or how the chickens would be marketed, assuming blindly that if the plant produced chickens people would buy them—a poultry Field of Dreams. Without a focus on a measurable goal beyond a ribbon cutting, details such as how to sell cold-storage goods in an area without refrigeration fell through the cracks. We had failed to “form the base of a pyramid that creates the possibility of a top,” the point of successful development work.30
The plant’s business plan also talked about “an aggressive advertising campaign” using TV and radio, with the modern mechanized chicken processing, not the products per se, as the focus. This was a terrific idea in a country where most people shopped at open-air roadside markets, bargaining for the day’s foodstuffs. With a per capita income of only $2,000, Iraq was hardly a place where TV ads would be the way to sell luxury chicken priced at double the competition. In a college business class, this plan would get a C− (it was nicely typed). Once someone told the professor that $2.58 million had already been spent on it, the grade might drop to a D.
I located a report on the poultry industry from June 2008 by the Inma Agribusiness Program, part of the United States Agency for International Development (and so named for the Arabic word for “growth”). The report’s conclusion, available before we built our plant, was that several factors made investment in the Iraqi fresh-poultry industry a high-risk operation.
1. Lack of a functional cold chain in order to sell fresh chicken meat rather than live chickens;
2. Prohibitive electricity costs;
3. Lack of data on consumer demand and preference for fresh chicken;
4. Lack of competitiveness vis-à-vis frozen imports from Brazil and USA;
5. Lack of critical mass to achieve a break-even cost in slaughterhouse operations;
6. Lack of Integrated Poultry Farming to lower working capital requirements.
Working capital is a very high roadblock in poultry. Even though the growing cycle is only 7–8 weeks, farmers have to finance almost 5kg of feed for each bird. Electricity cost is probably $.12–$.15 per bird per cycle, and chicks cost $.70 each.
In the light of current circumstances Inma does not recommend the revitalization of the fresh poultry industry in Iraq as a priority until a proper cold chain is restored and affordable grid electricity available.
Despite the report’s worrying conclusion that “there are no data
on the size of the market for fresh chicken,” the Army and the State Department went ahead and built the poultry-processing plant on the advice of Major Janice. The Major acknowledged that we could not compete on price but insisted that “we will win by offering a fresh, locally grown product … which our research shows has a select, ready market.” Major Janice had got it wrong about having done market research suggesting a role for fresh halal chicken and had in fact ignored advice that said no data were available on such a market.
A now defunct blog set up to publicize the project dubbed it “Operation Chicken Run” and included one farmer’s sincere statement, “I fought al Qaeda with bullets before you Americans were here. Now I fight them with chickens.” An online commentator named Jenn of the Jungle added to the blog, proudly declaring:
This right here is what separates America from the swill that is everyone else. We are the only ones who don’t just go, fight a war, then say hasta la vista. We give fuzzy cute little baby chicks. I love my country.
So, to sum up: USAID/Inma recommended against the plant in 2008, no marketing survey was done, Major Janice claimed marketing identified a niche, a business plan was crafted around the wish, not the data, $2.58 million was spent, no chickens were being processed, and, for the record, al Qaeda was still in business. With this in mind, and the plant devoid of dead chickens, we probably want to wish Major Janice the best with her new ventures. Telemarketing? Refi sales? Nope, Major Janice left the Army, and the US Department of Agriculture in Baghdad hired her. Her new passion was cattle insemination, and we learned from her blog, “You don’t just want semen from bulls whose parents had good dairy production. You may want good feet, good back conformation or a broad chest.” Just what you’d expect from a pile of bull.
Soon after my first chicken plant visit we played host to three Embassy war tourists. Unlike the minority who traveled out on real business, most people at the Embassy rarely, if ever, left the Green Zone during their one-year assignments to Iraq. They were quite content with that, happy to collect their war zone pay and hardship pay and hazardous duty pay while relaxing at the bar. Some did get curious and wanted to have a peek at this “Iraq” place they’d worked on for months, and so they ginned up an excuse to visit an ePRT.
A successful visit meant allowing them to take the pictures that showed they were out in the field but making them miserable enough that they wouldn’t come back and annoy us again without a real reason. One gang of fun lovers from the Embassy who wrote about water issues in Iraq decided to come out to Indian Country. At the ePRT we needed to check on some of the wells we were paying for (i.e., to see if there was a hole in the ground where we’d paid for one; we faced a constant struggle to determine if what we paid for even existed), and so the opportunity was heaven sent. The bunch arrived fresh from the Green Zone, two women and a man. The women still wore earrings (we knew the metal got hot and caught on the headsets) and had their hair pulled back with scrunchies (anyone who had to live in the field cut it short). The guy was dressed for a safari, with more belts and zippers than Michael Jackson and enough pockets and pouches to carry supplies for a weekend. Everyone’s shoes were clean. Some of the soldiers quietly called our guests gear queers.
Everywhere we stopped, we attracted a crowd of unemployed men and kids who thought we’d give them candy, so the war tourists got multiple photos of themselves in their chic getups standing next to Iraqis. They were happy. But because it was 110 degrees and the wells were located in distant dusty fields an hour away, after the first photo op or two the war tourists were quickly exhausted and filthy, meaning they were happy to not do it all again.
We took two more tourists back to the chicken plant: the Embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission (who proclaimed the visit the best day he’d ever had in Iraq, suggesting he needed to get out more often) and a journalist friend of General Odierno, who was thus entitled to VIP treatment. VIPs fly, not drive, and so tended to see even less than regular war tourists. Their visits were more highly managed so that they would stay on message in their blogs and tweets. It turns out most journalists are not as inquisitive as TV and movies would have you believe. Most are interested only in a story, not the story. Therefore, it was easy not to tell the journalist about the chicken plant problems. Instead, we had some chickens killed so the place looked busy. We had lunch at the slaughter plant—fresh roasted chicken bought at the market. The Iraqis slow roast it like the El Salvadorans do and it was juicy, with crisp skin. Served lightly salted, it simply fell apart in your mouth. We dined well and, as a bonus, consumed the evidence of our fraud.
Midcourse Correction
A thousand years ago, on day one at my ePRT, I had been outraged by Sheep for Widows, fuming over the obvious waste of $25,000 for something so unlikely to enhance the reconstruction of Iraq. In the intervening months, I’d had a fast tour through any number of projects that achieved the same level of uselessness, albeit at frighteningly higher costs in money, effort, and time. The PRTs had been working in Iraq for three years before I arrived, but you’d sooner be able to lick the back of your own neck, as the Iraqis would say when something was impossible, than see any real results or progress. I had expected a rational system in Iraq. Instead, what I found was a Wonderland-like game where the goal seemed to be to throw a stone into the water and make no ripples. I was beginning to understand the rules: Someone at the Embassy would create a Line of Effort that fit a political need in Washington. A PRT or an Army unit would think up a corresponding project at dinner, secure funding over the weekend, and hire a contractor by Tuesday. Iraqis would watch a million dollars fall from the sky and a milk collection center would pop up. Then we’d hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony and move on. Reconstruction was a lot like the war itself, almost existential. We fought the war because we were in Iraq to fight the war. We ran projects because we had money for projects.
In spite of myself, I had overcome my initial shock and awe at the titanic wastes of money I had become responsible for managing. Things that were surprising the first time around became business as usual by the third or the fifteenth repeat. Take the Ready-Made Clothing factory. We spent money to train local women to work there, hiring sewing teachers, paying rent on a building, buying sewing machines, and acquiring some other bits and bobs. We gave the big money to the factory owner, who pocketed $200,000 to turn all this into the Mahmudiyah Women’s Sewing Training Center. We justified the expense by again claiming the project would “accelerate economic development by providing much needed skilled labor.” Someone reviewing the proposal wrote in the margin, “What will happen if these women are trained and the factory can’t hire them?” That proved to be the key question, because as the $200,000 was spent, Chinese imports began arriving in Iraq, such that a shirt from our facility cost 10,000 dinars, while a shirt from China cost 3,000 dinars. The factory staff dwindled from a thousand to forty even as our training program ran its course. We turned unskilled, unemployed women into semiskilled, unemployed women. This outcome was better than our carpet-weaving training classes in the same neighborhood, which local gangsters co-opted, one even using children as “trainee” bonded workers until we shut them down.
Or take the Kuba beef-processing plant. There we spent $170,000 to build the plant before giving it to the man who owned the land. He did some beef processing for three months, then moved to Dubai and rented the plant to someone else. That person processed beef for three more months, then abandoned the plant entirely when his delivery truck broke down. Four extended families had moved into the abandoned plant and now lived there as squatters. Someone (it might have been us, we’re checking) was still paying for a guard, whom we asked to meet. One of the squatters said the guard had a second job and so did not have time to spend at the plant. The soldiers pulling security for us gave candy to the kids who lived in our abandoned facility, all out of practiced habit.
There were also veterinary clinics, crucial to improving local agriculture, since healthier animals produced more
meat and milk and bred better. At our clinic, medicinal solutions were stored in empty liter soda bottles because of a lack of clean glassware. Most medicines had run out; Saddam had ordered the last shipment under the UN Oil for Food program. Amazingly, the UN had just delivered some medicines ordered years earlier, though they had expired in 2008. The doctor said, “Under Saddam we at least got medicines once in a while. Now we are free, but we don’t have medicine.” Nor did they have clean water. Our conversation:
ME: How do you get water?
VET: We dig a well.
ME: How is the water?
VET: It is too salty to use, so we throw it away after pumping it.
The staff instead bought water from a vendor and carried it in bottles to work. The head vet was an older woman who had majored in English. With an eye toward some future ePRT project, I asked her what the clinic needed most and she said, “For me to leave here and live in America. Give me a scholarship.”
Fed on this daily diet of absurdity, I became inured to doing little and expecting less, and it was gallows humor fun to mock art shows and make jokes about widows trying to eke out a living. I was agreeing to coast along, possessing sight but no vision.
The problem was that coasting wasn’t good enough. I was going to have to fail more or at least spend more, spitting out black and white to swallow whole the overripe range of grays my position called for. The message was delivered Lima Charlie (loud and clear) when the Empire struck back, calling me into the Embassy for a come-to-Jesus session over my canceling the Sheep for Widows project. People had complained. Buccaneer sheiks were our friends. Widows were trending up. The staff whined to my boss that none of the previous team leaders had ever asked for costs and metrics. The staff reminded him that they had spent millions without a question being asked. Of course, these statements were true. Everybody did it. The State contractors did it, USAID did it, the Colonels did it. Our job was not to think in or out of the box but to retrace endlessly the outline of the box itself.
We Meant Well Page 12
