IN

XII. STRATEGY AND APPROACHES FOR IMPROVEMENT

XII.10. SOCIAL STRATEGIES

XII.10.1. COOPERATION AND SOCIAL UNDERSTANDING

Both food aid and development aid to Afghanistan's rural sector will be better targeted and more effective to the extent that aid interventions and development projects are formulated with a good understanding of the social, ecological, and economic dynamics of Afghanistan's various agro ecosystems. WFP's analysis of social groups at the village level and the livelihoods analysis approach advocated by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit both bring valuable insights to the aid planning process, but further inter-agency cooperation is needed.

XII.10.2. NEED ASSESSMENT

Food aid requirements need to be assessed and delivery implemented with greater sensitivity to fostering food security in both the short and longer terms. Food aid should not be withheld or down-sized on the assumption that livestock assets estimated to be on the target landscape must be converted to "cereal equivalents" for consumption within that season's household food supply. Substitution of Cash-for-Work (CfW) for Food-for-Work (FfW) should give poor rural households more choice in the allocation of the resources. This would also remove some downward pressure on wheat prices. Although rice from Pakistan remained cheaper than wheat in May 2002, wheat farmer tenants who had to pay rents in cash complained that the dramatic decrease in wheat prices in the past year made it much more difficult to pay cash rents agreed upon the previous fall.

XII.10. 3. ASSISTANCE TO IRRIGATED AND NON-IRRIGATED AREAS

The aid program that delivered USAID-funded "seed and fertilizer aid" to largely irrigated farm households in mostly central provinces of Afghanistan should be carefully assessed. This might better be part of a broader plan to provide "integrated agro-economic assistance to poor rural households" at a nationwide level. Such assistance might not necessarily always include distribution in kind to rural households, but-building on the experience of the Spring 2002 fertilizer voucher program-might better consist of a "flexible basket of vouchers cum grant funding" that could be paid out to qualifying poor rural households across the entire agro-pastoral spectrum in mixes deemed by administering NGOs to be appropriate to each household situation. Relying on careful coordination with WFP/FAO food security assessment survey findings, highest priority in aid targeting would be given to delivering a flexible package of agro-economic assistance to the most food-insecure communities and households. Many Kutchi pastoral and agro-pastoral communities are thought to have very significant food insecurity and therefore they should have equal benefit from aid to the rural sector.

XII.10.4. ETHNIC EVALUATION

It is essential to the long-term survival of Afghanistan that the population become "Afghans" rather than of one of the many present ethnic groups. However, understanding of the ethnic composition of rural communities is often key to formulation of the kinds of legislation and project design needed to proactively move against bias and discrimination in educational and employment opportunities, access to credit, access to land and water, access to health care, and practically all essential aspects that make up the fabric of rural life. Ignorance of ethnic composition of societies tends to favor the sociopolitical status quo. In certain sensitive circumstances questions on ethnicity have been left out of census and other social research due to risks thought to be associated with knowledge about ethnic demographics and how they may have shifted over time. It should remain up to the Afghan people to decide whether such information can be useful in building a more just and dynamic society.

XII.10. 5. HEALTH CARE

Nationwide access to primary health care needs to include universal vaccination of all children as well as free access to family planning services for all married women. A nationwide program to promote family planning is urgently needed to help reduce annual population growth from an estimated 3% per annum to 1.3% per annum within ten years. According to one Afghan gynecologist working in Wardak province, many Afghan women eagerly desire access to family planning, but are constrained by often illiterate men who adhere to an antiquated "as many as God gives me" approach to family size. Such an approach-an utter anachronism in the age of universal vaccination of children--is already condemning many rural households to a rapid and irreversible diminution of arable farmland per rural person to levels below the likely threshold of land needed for economic viability and a reasonable quality of life. On-going lack of awareness of, and lack of access to, family planning therefore possibly constitutes the very greatest threat to Afghanistan's national security and social stability. As President Karzai's wife is herself a gynecologist, there is good reason to believe that proposals to provide those forms of family planning endorsed by the Muslim religion would be considered with interest at high levels of government.

XII.10.6. LAND RENT REFORM

Access to land needs to become more equitable. Land rent reform legislation is urgently needed to enable more rural households to participate 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.

XII.10.7. RANGE AND WATERSHED MANAGEMENT

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 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.

XII.10.8. SEED AID

To be more effective, seed aid and other aid to the rural sector might need to be implemented in a coordinated manner within the context of a Rural Economic Stimulus Package (RESP). If such program were structured to deliver as 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 about US$1.7 billion if implemented on a nationwide basis. Any project on such a scale would need to be carefully vetted in ways that compare Keynesian socioeconomic pump-priming benefits with parallel risks of corruption, inflationary impacts, and creating a sense of dependency within rural communities.

XII.10.9. 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 take the form of GEF 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 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 evapo-transpiration from new forest canopy. At present, extrapolation from documented cases of rainfall recycling in the Amazon and other areas of the humid tropics to application in arid areas in West Asia remains entirely speculative.