Slight remission in drought offers little change

At first glance, Tandora, 75 km west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, is a prosperous little village. Nestled at the base of Halmond mountain, this small farming community of 60 families in the central province of Vardak, still enjoy the last remnants of snow melting on its peaks, despite a spring heat wave for May. As water streams down the hillside towards the parched wheat and potato fields belonging to Azizollah, one wonders why he isn’t happy. “There is simply not enough water,” the 70 year-old farmer told IRIN. “Yes, it is a bit better than last year, but already I am cultivating less land. How am I to feed my family?” Despite a slight remission in the drought in pockets of the country, this is a question being asked by many Afghans. The UN estimates that, like Azizollah, 85 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives in rural areas directly dependent on agriculture for survival. Particularly disturbing for aid officials is that this year could be on par with last in terms of impact, despite what little reprieve nature has offered. “We are still trying to get an exact handle on the coming cropping season, but early indications suggest the situation might be a little bit better than last year,” the World Food Programme (WFP) deputy country director for Afghanistan, Peter Goosens, told IRIN in Kabul. “After coming out of such a bad year, however, a little improvement over last year isn’t an improvement at all,” he warned. Pending more conclusive results from an ongoing crop survey to be released in June, he declined to quantify the severity of the problem. According to a recent WFP report, however, over one million people will face an unbridgeable food-security gap in the next two to four months, before the next harvest. What concerns Goosens is the result of a WFP planting survey for February and March indicating that farmers overall are planting much less than the agency hoped for this year. According to the survey, the reduction of planting of all crops was “widespread and dramatic”, with farmers more concerned with weather conditions than with access to seed. Seed was being widely purchased and local varieties appeared to be locally available, the survey noted. Despite some rain and snow this year, “there was a lot less water than normal”, Goosens said. Many of the farmers were being particularly cautious now, afraid of losing valuable resources to another year of drought, he added. Given last year’s drought, many farmers had to sell off some of their assets, and “this year’s rainfall was just not sufficient enough to give them the necessary incentive to risk whatever little money they had left”, he said. According to the UN, out of a population of 21 million people, 11 million are affected by the drought, 3 million of them severely. Qualifying this last group further, Goosens said: “These are people who are being forced to sell off their assets, cattle, livestock, land in some cases and, in the worst case scenario, [they] pack up their remaining belongings and leave”. Early indications suggest that WFP’s wheat shortfall this year will not be worse than last year’s - but will nonetheless remain huge, requiring massive ongoing assistance for the conceivable future. Of a national annual wheat consumption of 4.5 million mt, there was a shortfall of 2.2 million mt last year, or 50 percent of the country’s needs. From July 2000 to June 2001, WFP will have provided Afghanistan with 200,000 mt of wheat - barely 10 percent of the shortfall. The food agency relies on a network of NGOs for distribution and food-for-work programmes, but many of these NGOs have already reached the limits of their own internal capacity. Meanwhile, the office of the United Nations Coordinator for Afghanistan in its report on drought and displacement issued last week said over a million Afghans would face difficulties in getting enough food to stay alive in the next two to four months.