Bumper wheat harvest predicted

Afghanistan is expected to harvest its richest wheat crop in two decades, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced this week, but malnutrition remains widespread and the long-term outlook is not guaranteed. "The country has suffered from four years of severe drought, and this is great news for farmers," Etienne Careme, an FAO information officer, told IRIN from the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Thursday. The FAO predicted that farmers would produce four million mt of wheat this summer, reducing the need for foreign imports to one million mt. "Up to 85 percent of the Afghan population are dependent on agriculture, so you can see how important it is," Careme added. Serge Verniau, the FAO’s representative in Afghanistan, attributes the high crop yield to increased rainfall and hard work by farmers and aid organisations since the most recent war in the country ended with the fall of the Taliban in 2002. "I would say that the FAO’s emergency activities, such as the delivery of seeds, fertilisers and tools and the successful control of potentially damaging locust outbreaks in the north, contributed to this success," he said. But the World Food Programme (WFP), which works with the FAO, received the news with cautious optimism. "There is a very good crop expected this year and we are pleased about this, but we should not assume that this means a complete recovery of agriculture," Susana Rico, the WFP’s programme director in Afghanistan, told IRIN from Kabul. Highlighting the uneven nature of agricultural development country-wide, Rico said the recovery had not been seen everywhere. In particular, the south continued to be affected by drought, she said. Moreover, this year’s harvest did not necessarily indicate longer-term agricultural success. "One bumper crop does not mean long-term recovery - just a better year." One reason cited by Rico for the improved harvest was the cultivation of new areas of land, including tracts of pasture. This showed initial benefits, she said, but could also have wide-ranging negative effects. "This is not necessarily a good thing; cultivating pastures encroaches on the livelihood of livestock farmers, and it may eventually have a negative impact on cultivation, because these soils are not good for agriculture," she said. An increase in wheat production could therefore hide a slow-down in the recovery of livestock farmers. "You may also create environmental hazards such as soil erosion," she warned. The FAO classes 70 percent of Afghans as undernourished, and Rico noted that chronic-level malnutrition was still widespread. As an emergency response to the threat of further malnourishment, the principal staple crop of wheat became the focus of agricultural efforts. But Rico warned that success with wheat alone could not solve the nation’s nutrition problem. What was needed was more diversified agriculture towards providing a more balanced diet. The FAO and WFP’s July 2002 Crop & Food Supply Assessment Mission estimated that 5.9 million Afghans remained highly vulnerable to food insecurity and dependent on relief assistance. Of these, 3.3 million were directly affected by natural disaster and conflict. Rico said the WFP would work to build on the success of this year’s wheat harvest towards supporting better diets in Afghanistan well into the future. "We concentrate as much as we can on supplementary and institutional feeding to address the long-term as well as the short-term interventions." But she warned that creating a stable food supply would take time and investment. "In the long term, it will take years for the whole population to benefit from these improvements in the economy and agriculture," she said.