Statistical Classification of Agricultural Land by Area and the Amount of Production of Some Agricultural Crops in Iraqi Governorates for the Years (2005) and (2010( by Using Cluster Analysis Methods (Ward's & Hierarchical Centroid Clustering)

Abstract

The agricultural sector is an important economic sector that contributes significantly to economic development in developing countries with an important contribution bulk of the Gross domestic product of developing countries, Therefore; for the importance of this vital sector, this paper seek to classify agricultural lands not previously classified for all governorates, except the Kurdistan Region, to the extent of their validity for vegetable growing for the years (2005) and (2010). These two years are very important for the agricultural sector in Iraq, the first year (2005) comes after the collapse in this sector due to the political and economic vacuum after (2003), while the year (2010) marks the beginning of the advancement of the agricultural sector through the development of productive policies by the Ministry of Agriculture. The methods used to solve this problem are the hierarchical methods of cluster analysis in the analysis of data because these methods depend on the creation of clusters of the most similar variables and in our study these variables are the agricultural lands of the studied governorates. The paper also seeks to predict the quantities of production after (2010). We found that the northern provinces in general and Ninewa in particular is one of the most fertile and best agricultural land in Iraq, compared to the quantities of production of other provinces, despite the decline in the interest in the agricultural sector and also to lead in the formation of clusters before other provinces.