IN

XI. FIELD SURVEY OF CROP IMPROVEMENT AND SEED NEEDS

XI. 4. CONCLUSIONS

This survey showed that given appropriate support, Afghan farmers can produce much of the country's food requirements. Of particular importance is improving farmers' access to irrigation water (the country's agriculture depends largely on irrigation), quality seed of good varieties, and fertilizer.

There seems an increasing scope for Afghan farmers to adopt new varieties, although those they currently have are predominantly of local origin. The objective of making available new varieties should be to increase the choices farmers have, and not solely to replace existing varieties, since local varieties may have superior attributes. Crop improvement efforts should be intensified to develop more efficient rainfed wheat varieties, considering the large areas cultivated and the continuing drought and shortage of irrigation water. Since wheat is used mainly for domestic consumption, households use other crops such as potato, barley and maize for sale in local markets. Therefore, having more productive varieties of these crops will support more viable rural economies.

The focus in seed should be on quality enhancement and not on quantity, since households have met a high proportion of their seed needs from sources within their communities including own production and other farmers. Alternative seed systems should, therefore, be developed within these communities to produce high quality seed and make it available to local farmers. Most farmers are aware of the quality attributes they desire in crop varieties.

Optimal use of other production inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides is restricted by their high prices of these inputs, with a high proportion of household debt being used each year to finance input costs. Since most farmers have their own land in addition to sharecropped land, access to water resources seems to be more important than access to land itself. Households rank access to irrigation water as the most important constraint to crop production.

The perception and interpretation of constraints by households in this survey reflect their scale of operation, which is relatively small and in most cases subsistence. Once the scale of operation or productivity levels increase, other aspects such as credit and marketing, which are now of low priority to households, will become more important.