Farmers to benefit from US $6 million agricultural project

The Afghan government has decided to take steps to fight opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) using its leading role in agriculture to define new opportunities to enable farmers to replace poppy with other crops, according to an FAO official. "FAO's role is to find alternative solutions, alternative livelihoods, to opium poppy cultivation," the official, Etienne Careme, told IRIN from the Afghan capital, Kabul. A UK-funded FAO project worth US $6 million is set to benefit more than 430,000 farmers in the mountainous Hazarajat region. The region had not traditionally been a poppy-producing area, but recent reports suggested that, attracted by high prices and the eradication of poppy in the more visible areas of Helmand and Kandahar, the crop was now being grown in the lower valleys with opium traders extending their influence into the remote highland areas, an FAO press statement said earlier this week. Sited to the southwest of Kabul, the Hazarajat is home to the Hazaras, an ethnic group comprising some 9 percent of the country’s population, who live at altitudes of between 2,000 and 3,200 metres. More than 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the FAO press release. The project’s objective is to reduce hunger and malnutrition, improve farm production, create income-generating opportunities and build up or strengthen institutions at the community, district and provincial levels, the statement added. "The project area is one of the poorest regions in Afghanistan. Social indicators for health and education remain low, with women having an inferior rating on almost all education and health scales according to the World Bank’s 1996 Social Indicators of Development," Careme said, adding that income generation for subsistence farmers remains below par. "These circumstances reflect a century of social neglect and isolation, as well as the harsh local environment," Careme said, pointing out that opportunities for agricultural development were relatively limited since the region was entirely mountainous with limited resources in terms of good agricultural land and water. At least 95 percent of the Hazaras obtain their income from their agricultural land and livestock, Careme said, adding that the government was taking steps at the national level to open the economy and promote the private sector in rural areas. "However, political uncertainty, inherent conservatism in the largely rural population and the lack of opportunity for such people to take entrepreneurial risks has made progress slow," he said. Natural resource degradation is long-standing, continuous and complex and the government was examining the possibilities of community-based approaches to the management of natural resources, he added. "The community-based problem-solving approach through action-research, which is the core of this project, has been successfully implemented by the FAO in a number of countries," Careme explained. "Action-oriented research involves the communities in the identification of problems and direct participation in the problem-solving process," he added, stressing that this mode of operation was ideal in an area of relatively low productivity and limited natural resources.