IN

VII. SOCIAL NEEDS AND CONSIDERATIONS

VII.12. COMMUNITY-BASED APPROACH

A community-based approach to range and watershed management is needed to ensure that vulnerable portions of rural communities achieve and maintain good access to water supplies. Action research is needed to examine equity and environmental sustainability issues related to the privately-held grasslands in some areas of eastern Afghanistan, in contrast to the more open access grasslands in other parts of the country. Such research should be mandated to produce recommendations for new incentive-based legislation dealing with management and access to grasslands. An existing tradition of economic partnership between pastoral and sedentary rural communities may help provide a basis for community-based and or private sector management of rangelands.

VII.13. RURAL ECONOMIC STIMULUS PACKAGE

Seed and other aid to the rural sector might be implemented in a coordinated manner within a Rural Economic Stimulus Package (RESP). If such a program were structured to deliver grant aid to rural households the average amount of money that a small number of farm households surveyed in Logar and Kabul Provinces said they would like to borrow (about US$1,200), such a project might cost as much as US$1.7 billion if implemented on a nationwide basis. Any project on such a scale must be carefully vetted in ways that compare Keynesian socio-economic pump-priming benefits with parallel risks of corruption, inflationary impacts, and creating a sense of dependency within rural communities.

Irrigation, tillage, seed, fertilizer, land, and labor are all factors that farmers need to produce a successful crop. A farm household that lacks adequate amounts of one or more of these factors is apt to have a distinct disadvantage compared to farmers who have adequate supplies of all of them. Housing, medical care, clothing, cooking fuel, livestock, and transportation costs are some of the other inputs that are critical to the establishment and maintenance of rural livelihoods.

There is obviously good reason to avoid swinging from the "cash famine" situation that Lautze et al. (May 2002) describe to the other end of the spectrum, creating an inflationary "too much money chasing too few goods" situation.

Rationale for a RESP: In late June, UNHCR reduced drop-off payments to returning Afghan refugees from $20 to $10 per capita due both to limited funds and a desire to slow the rate of refugee return that had exceeded 10,000 people per day beginning in March. Clearly there was likely to be severe shortfall in "absorption capacity." A $10 per capita drop-off fee is too small to be "economically meaningful", and without other social support available to returnees, constitutes a form of "virtual abandonment." While the reduction in drop-off fees may theoretically constitute a reduced incentive to return, reports are that the Government of Pakistan has begun to implement a policy that makes it increasingly difficult for Afghan refugees to remain in Pakistan[NY Times,30 May 2002]. Conditions in Pakistan appear to have become the more significant factor driving the rate of refugee return from the largest population of Afghan refugees that was estimated to be as high as 2 million.

Many rural households in Afghanistan may need at least $1200 to be able to meaningfully re-enter the agricultural economy as productive farmers or pastoralists. Surprisingly, traditional land-owning patterns remain remarkably intact in central Afghanistan. Households that have lived out of the country for more than 20 years report being able to re-occupy their agricultural lands without challenge. Similarly, land rental rates which greatly favor landowners appear to remain virtually intact, helped undoubtedly by the swelling numbers of landless refugees searching for opportunities to rent agricultural land. Some pros and cons of a Rural Economic Stimulus Package are listed in the table below.

Table 38 (PDF File 61Kb)
Some Pros and Cons of a Rural Economic Stimulus Package

VII.14. CLIMATE AND RE-FORESTATION

Some climatologists predict that drought conditions may remain endemic to West Asia for as long as surface sea temperatures (SSTs) remain elevated in the western Pacific. If elevated SSTs in the western Pacific are linked to global warming, there may be no reduction in these SSTs in the foreseeable few decades. One of the best drought mitigation and poverty alleviation strategies that the West Asia region could undertake might be GEF (Global Environment Facility)or Gulf-state funded re-forestation of the rolling foothill areas stretching from Eastern Turkey and extending across northern areas of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. While there would be many socio-environmental benefits linked to such re-forestation, including reportedly better aquifer recharge, improved dry season stream flows, less soil erosion and flood damage, improved supplies of wood for fuel and construction and biodiversity conservation to the extent that native tree species are employed in the re-forestation, the most ambitious goal would be enhanced recycling of rainfall and other groundwater as new rainfall as a result of enhanced evapotranspiration from new forest canopy. At present, extrapolation from documented cases of rainfall recycling in the Amazon and other areas of the humid tropics to applications in arid areas in West Asia remains entirely speculative.

Once the GoA has ratified certain international conventions, the GoA would be qualified to apply to the Global Environment Facility for funding of projects that met the GEF's funding criteria. A regional re-forestation project might qualify under both the international waters and conservation of biodiversity criteria. Creation of additional carbon sink would add a climate change aspect as well. This might also be the first project in the world to seek to reverse declines in average annual rainfall through large scale re-forestation.

As seedlings planted in many of these landscapes would need to be watered by hand for the first three years, the project would generate significant employment. The success of the project would probably hinge on resource tenure issues. Local communities would very likely need to entitled to sufficient forest products to make the protection of the newly-established forest resources "worth their while."