IN

VII. SOCIAL NEEDS AND CONSIDERATIONS

VII.10. EQUITABLE ACCESS TO LAND

Access to land needs to be more equitable. WFP food security analysis in spring 2002 found landless households to be far more food insecure. Land rent reform legislation is urgently needed to enable more rural households to participate with more social equity and more productively in the rural economy. Currently, sharecroppers pay as high as 80% of their crop as rent. This percentage should shift more towards the opposite rate of landowners getting about 20% of the crop. Legislation would need to be drafted so as to give landowners ample incentives to assist tenants in obtaining adequate and well-timed access to affordable agricultural inputs.

The following table shows that about 32 years ago, almost 50% of farmers in Khandahar were landless, in the sense of not owning their own land. Agricultural laborers, who were not able to rent or sharecrop land, ranged from negligible to 15% in the seven provinces surveyed.

Instances were encountered during this mission of villages in Ghazni and Wardak Provinces where most of the land was owned by a particular landowner or family; sharecropper families had farmed this land for many generations.

The return of roughly two million refugees, many to rural areas, is likely to put unprecedented pressures on land and other natural resources.

Table 32 (PDF File 62Kb)
Village Class Structure in 7 Provinces, 1970 (percentage) Sorted by Landlessness

VII.11. RISK OF WIDENING FOOD INSECURITY AND LIVELIHOOD GAPS

WFP survey data on food security collected in March 2002 in two districts of Saripul Province offer a rare glimpse of differences in nutritional supply that characterized four different social groups in 5 or 6 villages in each of these districts. The villages surveyed were thought to be "highly food insecure." It is not suggested that the "security gaps" found in these villages are representative of similar gaps elsewhere in the country. Rather, these cases are examined in some detail for what they tell about the potential for security gaps to arise. The agricultural zoning of the area "is characterized by irrigated (10%-20%) and rainfed (80%-90%) lands and falls within the Northern Rainfed Food Economy Zone No. 5" as described by Clarke and Seaman (1998).

Five other organizations participated in these surveys: ACF, CDC, GOAL, IMC, and UNICEF. Four medical doctors were involved: Dr. Sadiq for IMC in Balkhab district, Dr. Iqbal and Dr. Wirwais for UNICEF, and Dr. Khan for ACF in Kohistanat District. WFP nutritionist Sandra Tedeschi was involved in overseeing the survey work in both districts. Background and methodological information for the survey work was provided by (1) a 1998 WFP document, Preliminary Guide to the Food Economies of Afghanistan (Written by P. Clarke and J. Seaman.) and (2) W.J. Fielding and S. Jaspers had developed the Rapid Emergency Food Needs Assessment or REFNA in January-February 2002 that was used in the survey (WFP. April 2002). In other words, this assessment represents the state of the art as practiced in Spring 2002 by the development community in Afghanistan.
The 2001 VAM Annual Assessment estimated the population in Balkhab District to be 47,218, and in Kohistanat District to be 72,332. The March 2002 assessment, whose data is provided here, did not assess the "better off" category of households that is thought to make up about 6% of the population of Balkhab District and about 7% of the Kohistanat population.

Complete seed aid for these districts would presumably be a mix of barley, potato, and pulses. Targeting such aid should include the most vulnerable groups with access to land: female-headed households, small landowners, and sharecroppers. Relative needs of the better-off and typical groups should be defined and perhaps restricted from one or both of these groups. There should also be confidence that the seed available for distribution was the same variety already known to be appropriate for these areas. Whenever such determinations are highly location-specific, it would be safer and more equitable to provide appropriate support to all food-insecure groups in these districts.

Table 33 (PDF File 64Kb)
Social Categories as Defined by WFP in 2 Districts of Saripul Province

The table below provides a view of WFP's food security data for different social groups in six villages of Kohistanat District of Saripul Province in March 2002. The data indicate that sampled landless households produced from 0 to 5 percent of their minimum Kilocalorie food requirements during the three-month period prior to the interviews. This was in contrast to the "typical" group of farmers who produced from 0 to 42 percent of their minimum Kilocalorie requirements in the preceding three-month period.

Reliability of these survey data is somewhat called into question by the anomalous data indicating that the sharecropper group in three villages was able to provide for somewhat more of their food requirements than was the "typical" group of farmers. When the data for the six villages is averaged by social grouping, it suggests that the "typical" and the sharecropping social groups were able to provide about 26% of their food needs from their own production, in contrast to 17% of food needs by the small landowner group and less than 2% of food needs by the landless group.

Table 34 (PDF File 59Kb)
Percent of Minimum Required Dietary Kilocalories Met "in Last 3 Months" From Own Food Production by Farmers Surveyed by WFP in 6 Villages of Kohistanat District, Saripul Province, March 2002

When purchased food and food aid were analyzed by social group for these six villages, the average gap between landless and "typical" farmer groups ranged from 25 to 33 percentage points. And, a gap opened up between typical and sharecropper farmers of 15 percentage points. Both the table above and the table below show that sharecropper households were more food-secure by 9-10 percentage points than "small landowners." As a result largely of food aid, the gap of about 15 percentage points between landless and small landowner groups in the table above narrowed to about 8 percentage points in the table below. The WFP survey found that typical landowners had more assets that could be sold; this enabled them to meet most of their Kilocalorie requirements in four of the six villages.

The greatest level of food insecurity of all groups was in Yakhak village. Here, no group produced more than 5% of its food needs for the previous three months. After purchased food and food aid was accounted for, the four social groups remained tightly clustered at 56% to 64% of minimum kilocalorie requirements. In other words, all four groups were starving. In the appendices accompanying the WFP report on these two districts is a note that reads "Yakhak has no irrigated land, and thus has been discarded as an outlier. However, it has been noted that those areas wholly reliant on rainfed land will be worse off."

The FAO Provincial Land Cover Atlas of the Islamic State of Afghanistan (1999), however, indicates that of a total estimated 420,000 hectares of cropland in Saripul Province, 89% is rainfed with the remaining 11% being irrigated. While it is conceivable that irrigated land is more common in Kohistanat District than in some other districts of Saripul, the discarding of Yakhak village as an outlier "because it has no irrigated land" would appear to be capricious and unjustified. If the analysts were concerned that villages with no irrigated land were under-represented in the sample, they might have expanded the survey to include more such villages.

Table 35 (PDF File 60Kb)
Percent of Minimum Required Dietary Kilocalories Met "in Last 3 Months" From a Combination of Own Food Production, Purchase of Food, and Food Aid in 6 Villages Surveyed by WFP in Kohistanat District, Saripul Province, March 2002

Again, when reviewing table below for Balkhab District of Saripul Province, WFP takes the position that Shagay village is an outlier because the "typical group" was only able to produce 5% of their food during the three-month period when four other villages in the district could produce 24 to 57% of their food supply. Zebrak was also taken to be an outlier for its much higher food production. Is WFP privy to some principle that more-or-less impoverished villages in drought-stricken environments are all expected to produce similar percentages of their annual food needs?

The term "outlier" is used by statisticians to refer to situations where there are 20 or more data points and a few of those data points are more than, say, 2 standard deviations away from the mean. WFP's analysts are themselves wide of the mark to discard two out of five villages as "outliers", as the remaining three villages can hardly be capable of defining a "central tendency," let alone a central tendency to which other villages in the area would be expected to conform. The limited commentary in the report gives no hint of any reason to think that the assessment methods used in Shagay and Zebrak villages were any less accurate than those used in the other three villages. On the contrary, anthropometric measurements of children resulted in the following finding reported in a text box on p. 8 of the WFP report:

In other words, triangulation with this additional anthropometric data would seem to confirm that the other assessment data shown in the table below for Shagay is indeed accurate. The village was indeed in a terrible state, and children were starving. Statisticians discard numbers as "outliers" because they are too far from the mean to be regarded as credible or valid. Errors of measurement or recording are assumed to have taken place. It is an entirely different matter for a report editor to discard valid data because of some preconceived desire to smooth data that can be reasonably expected to validly contain a high degree of variability. Knowledge that the sampling technique was neither random nor large does not give an editor cause to arbitrarily discard data at will, in order to smooth it or otherwise make it "better behaved" or "less alarming."

Table 36 (PDF File 58Kb)
Percent of Minimum Required Dietary Kilocalories Met "in Last 3 Months" From Own Food Production by Farmers Surveyed by WFP in 6 Villages of Balkhab, Saripul Province, March 2002

In the table above, the two columns on the far right reveal an uncanny similarity between WFP survey data on percent of Kilocalories provided by own production for the four social groups for the past three months for five villages in Balkhap district and six villages in Kohistanat district of Saripul Province. And, this similarity has been achieved without discarding any of the outlier data that WFP chose to remove from their own averages. The practically non-existent production data for Shagay village and for Yakhak village, as well as for the landless group in all villages, helps to put to rest the idea found in a WFP October 2001 report that villagers can "cover" 20% of their food needs from undefined sources such as wild foods.

Table 37 (PDF File 59Kb)
Percent of Minimum Required Dietary Kilocalories Met "in Last 3 Months" Fom a Combination of Own Food Production, Purchase of Food, and Food Aid in 6 Villages Surveyed by WFP in Balkhab District, Saripul Province, March 2002

Again, in the table above, there is an uncanny similarity between the average data for the four social groups in the two districts. There is, in fact, enough similarity across the four tables to suggest that WFP analysts may have used the food security data itself to help define thresholds between the three social groups that have access to land. Thus, it can be seen in the table above that land-owning ranges for the social groups vary by district; differential could help to explain how the social groups may have been pigeon-holed with some selectivity. Unlike the landless category, there is no natural threshold between a small landowner and a "typical landowner." Similarly, a small landowner who also rents in some land could be assigned to either the sharecropper or small landowner categories.

Despite some methodological issues as to how the groups are defined, how villages are selected for assessment and how some surveyed villages may have been "deselected" on dubious grounds that they are "outliers," the data gathered in Saripul Province in March 2002 by WFP suggest that, for Saripul province at least: