Rural areas face lack of arable land

Suffering from years of severe drought, Afghanistan continues to lose large tracts of arable land - a particularly serious issue for rural communities, where upwards of 80 percent of the country's 28 million population lives. “The database available on various natural resources in Afghanistan is very limited, but Afghanistan is a desert area so desertification is a serious issue in the country,” Dr Prem Sharma, a senior project operations officer for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul. Marking the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought one week earlier, the FAO noted that many parts of the country - particularly in the northwest, west and the southwest belt regions, as well as a part of the central and eastern regions - faced desertification due to a continued lack of water. Mitigating that reality presents a serious challenge to experts. Twenty-five years earlier, the country had some three million hectares of land under irrigation, Sharma claimed, nearly double the figure today. According to an FAO report, except for the northeast and the eastern-central regions of the country, the situation had deteriorated over the past year. The country is suffering from a lack of rain, dry spells, extreme heat and winds, along with severe frost conditions. The areas prone to desertification were affected by drought and very low nighttime temperatures, the report added. Years of drought and decades of war had eradicated many forests in Afghanistan, leaving just three percent of the country forested today, the FAO official said. And while the Ministry of Irrigation had just signed an agreement with the World Bank and FAO to help rehabilitate over a thousand broken irrigation systems over the next three years, Sharma, who described this as a quick and serious effort, noted much more would be needed. Thousands of farmers were in need of assistance, as well as much of the country's irrigation infrastructure rehabilitated, he said. According to the Development Gateway, an independent nonprofit organisation, reporting on Afghanistan's reconstruction, 50 percent of country's irrigation canals had been destroyed.