After more than two decades of war and years of crippling drought, agricultural production capacity and food security were greatly compromised in Afghanistan. The country which had once boasted of an agricultural sector that contributed to more than 80% of the national income was now heavily dependent on food aid from international donors. In the late 1970s, Afghanistan had almost reached self-sufficiency, importing only 2500 tons of cereals, due to an efficient research program that developed and promoted high-yielding, disease-resistant varieties of cereals, horticultural, industrial, and oil crops. There were 19 agricultural research stations in the different agroclimatic zones of the country and the extension department routinely disseminated results to farmers through demonstration plots.

Conflict and drought changed all that. The government infrastructure and research institutes were destroyed. Qualified staff left the country. Equipment in research stations was looted and destroyed. Improved varieties lost their yield potential and succumbed to new races of pathogens. There was no water for irrigation, no pesticides or fertilizers, few roads to transport produce, and, most crippling of all, there was no seed to plant. An agricultural system that had once provided a steady income for about 80% of the population urgently needed to be revived.