AFGHANISTAN SEED AND CROP IMPROVEMENT SITUATION

VII. SOCIAL NEEDS AND CONSIDERATIONS

VII.1. SOCIAL OBJECTIVES

Food security and rural development have 2 main social dimensions: (1) increasing food production; (2) raising income of the poor by generating employment in rural areas

VII.2. AFGHANISTAN'S SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS

Afghanistan is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. Life expectancy is about ten years shorter than in Pakistan and 32 years shorter than in developed countries. Infant mortality rate in 2002 was 220 per 1,000 live births, about 5.5 times that of Iran. The average Afghan woman gives birth to almost 7 children, compared to an average of 1.7 children per woman in "high human development countries." In the USA, 7 or 8 women per 100,000 die in childbirth. In Afghanistan, it is around 1,700 per 100,000-almost as bad as the world's worst, Sierra Leone (New York Times, 23 June 2002).

A person in a high-human-development country eats almost twice as many calories as the average Afghan, whose average estimated daily intake of 1745 calories is about 17% below the estimated minimum daily need of rural Afghans. Many old people in Kabul subsist on naan (bread) and tea. Only 6% of the population was estimated to have access to safe drinking water in 1998.

VII.4. CHANNELING AID

Both food and development aid to the Afghan rural sector will be better-targeted and more effective if 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, in addition, further inter-agency cooperation is needed.

VII.5. SHORT- AND LONG-TERM AID INTEGRATION

Food aid requirements need to be assessed, and delivery implemented, with greater sensitivity to fostering food security in both the short- and long-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.

VII.6. ASSESSMENT OF FUTURE AID PROGRAMS TO ENSURE COVERAGE

Future aid programs, such as USAID-funded "seed and fertilizer aid" to largely irrigated farm households in mostly central provinces of Afghanistan in Spring 2002, should be carefully assessed before launch. Seed and fertilizer aid might better be part of a broader plan to provide "integrated agro-economic assistance to poor rural households" across the entire agro-pastoral spectrum at a nationwide level.

VII.7. A FOCUSED APPROACH FOR APPROPRIATE SEED RELIEF

One of the most ethically-sensitive aspects of the aid program in Afghanistan concerns its as-yet limited capacity to assist farming communities in rainfed areas. Rainfed communities tend to be the "weaker stakeholders" compared to their counterpart communities in irrigated areas. Irrigated agro-eco-systems in centrally-located areas are more productive per unit of land and could be perceived to be more important to the national economy.

VII.8. ETHNIC CONSIDERATIONS

Understanding the ethnic composition of rural communities is key to legislation and project design needed to move pro-actively against discrimination in education, employment, credit, land and water, health care, and all essential aspects of rural life. Ignorance of ethnic composition favors the socio-political 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.

VII.9. HEALTH CARE

Nationwide access to primary health care needs to include universal vaccination of all children as well as free and ready access to family planning services for all married women. A nationwide program to promote family planning is urgently needed to help reduce population growth from an estimated 3% per annum to 1.3% per annum within ten years. This would improve life for Afghan women; another key reason for reducing the population growth rate is that arable land is already inadequate.

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

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

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. Whenever such determinations are location-specific, it would be safer and more equitable to provide appropriate support to all food-insecure groups in these districts. Data gathered in Saripul Province in March 2002 by WFP suggest that, for Saripul province at least:

A significant disparity in land-holding sizes exists, ranging from 0 to 100 jerib.
Landless farm households did not have hidden reserves, wild foods, saleable assets, or off-farm labor to rescue them from "starvation" food deficits.
Villages with no irrigated land can be considerably more food-insecure than villages which own both rainfed and irrigated land.
Disparities in livestock holding that characterized different social groups suggest that livestock owned by one social group in a village were not sold or slaughtered to help feed households of a different social group.
Sharecroppers enjoyed food security as good as, if not somewhat better than, the food security of small landowners. Sharecropping probably offers tenants more secure access to inputs than that currently available to small landowner farmers.
Distribution of food aid had been far from sufficient to prevent significant food insecurity in most villages surveyed.
When aid to agricultural communities is scarce, use of land-holding status and other social attributes may be an effective way to target aid to the most needy households. But, as seed appropriate to stressed environments may be highly specific, such aid perhaps should take the form of vouchers for locally-available seed (if indeed it is locally available), etc.

VII.12. RURAL ECONOMIC STIMULUS PACKAGE

Seed and other rural aid might be implemented within a Rural Economic Stimulus Package (RESP). Structured to deliver grant aid to rural households, based on the average amount 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 US$1.7 billion on a nationwide basis. Any such project must be carefully vetted in ways that compare Keynesian socio-economic pump-priming benefits with parallel risks of corruption, inflationary impacts, and creating dependency within rural communities.