IN

VII. SOCIAL NEEDS AND CONSIDERATIONS

VII.1. SOCIAL OBJECTIVES

There are two main social dimensions of food security and rural development. One is the challenge of increasing food production; the other is raising income of the poor through generating employment in rural areas. These must consider:

In a larger coordinated strategy to protect and strengthen the diversity of rural livelihoods, two approaches should be taken:

Ability of a farmer to participate in the market is important and a major objective, but in Afghanistan it is highly constrained by illiteracy and limited infrastructure. To ensure increased farm income by participating in the market, these two constraints must be overcome, but this will take considerable time and investment.

Another essential aspect is to enhance the involvement of women. Seed and other programs should seek to employ women as much as possible, including women from women-headed households, even if it is necessary to also hire their "Mahrams" or male family members to accompany them.

VII.2. AFGHANISTAN'S SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS

Afghanistan is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. In the West Asia region, its social indicators are closer to Pakistan's than to those of its neighbors to the north or west. Life expectancy in Afghanistan is about ten years shorter than in Pakistan and about 32 years shorter than in the developed countries. Afghanistan's infant mortality rate, reported in June 2002 to be 220 per 1000 live births, was about 5.5 times that of Iran, and roughly 1.5 times that of Pakistan according to earlier, less grave UN figures shown in the table below.

Table 29 (PDF File 56Kb)
Basic Social Indicators for Afghanistan and Neighboring Countries

The average Afghan woman gives birth to almost seven children, compared to an average of 1.7 children per woman in the "high human development countries." In the USA, seven or eight women per 100,000 die in childbirth. In Afghanistan, it is likely to be around 1,700 per 100,000-almost as bad as the world's worst, Sierra Leone (New York Times, 23 June 2002)

And yet, rural health problems are not intractable. Dr. Roshanak, an Afghan gynecologist who returned two years ago from Pakistan to work in a small hospital in her native Wardak Province, reports that "maternal mortality at my hospital has fallen to zero since my return. It had been terrible"(conversation with John Dennis, 17 May 2002). She said that her hospital receives some materiel assistance from Kuwait, but that "it is not enough."

The average person in a high-human-development country eats almost twice as many calories as the average Afghan. The average estimated daily caloric intake of 1745 calories is about 17% below the estimated minimum daily need of rural Afghans. Many old people in Kabul reportedly subsist on naan (bread) and tea. Only 6% of the population was estimated to have access to safe drinking water in 1998.
Literacy is less than half that in Iran, and is about 20% less than the literacy rate in Pakistan. Clearly, investment in education will be crucial to Afghanistan's future.

VII.3. LIVELIHOODS ANALYSIS APPROACH TO REHABILITATING THE AFGHAN RURAL SECTOR

Adam Pain (March 2002) made the case that relief and development agencies in Afghanistan need to take a longer-term livelihoods analysis approach to rehabilitation of the rural sector, for effective and adequately targeted development assistance during the critical transition from relief to rehabilitation.

He writes of the "uncertainty and challenges at multiple levels-political, institutional, analytical, logistical, and of method", and urges agencies to coordinate their initiatives through the U.N.'s "Strategic Framework for Afghanistan." Produced in 1998, its "basic aim was to improve the coherence between aid and the political agenda of donors as a means not only of supporting a transition to peace in Afghanistan but also to address human rights which had become the major fracture line between the Taliban and donors" (Pain, 2002, pp.7-8).

According to the livelihoods analysis approach, communities in the Afghan rural sector rely on a complex array of resources-not all of them agricultural. Effective assistance interventions must take into account the diversity of coping and survival strategies in local communities. This would give a better awareness of different social groups that make up rural society and of their particular needs, resources, and interdependencies.

Rubin (2000) described the Afghan economy as "dualistic" consisting of (1) an urban economy dependent on the international state system and markets on the one hand, and of (2) a largely subsistence non-monetized rural economy on the other. Export of opium and derivative products would certainly be one major exception to this overly simplistic dichotomy.

The draft Afghan Food Security Strategy (Sloane, 2001) tended to equate subsistence with agricultural production: "To target possible food security assistance interventions, the population can be divided into three broad categories representing their general level of food security...the Groups are (i) those who are capable of being self-sufficient, (ii) those who are potentially or marginally self-sufficient (iii) those who have limited or no opportunities to provide for the needs of themselves and their families at an acceptable level"(Sloane, 2001, p.13).

Pain (March, 2002, p. 10) criticizes a "rural means agriculture" simplification as going hand-in-hand with preconceived notions of what assistance the rural sector requires. He criticizes DACAAR's baseline studies (DACAAR, 1999) as coinciding with a "monotonous landscape of interventions centered on the reconstruction of irrigation infrastructure, fruit tree nurseries and seedling distribution, wheat variety trials and seed production and at best some on-farm trials" and then proceeding with technical delivery with what "appears to be little understanding of the underlying village social structure and economy"(Pain, March 2002, pp.10-11).

However, this mission was favorably impressed by the scope of DACAAR's development mandate in Khwaja Omeri District of Ghazni Province, encompassing a "whole watershed perspective." DACAAR's program in this district included repair to a major reservoir used for irrigation, erosion control in range lands using check dams and research on planting of improved forage species on drought-damaged rangeland, agro-forestry on steeply sloping rangeland using fruit trees and other economic tree species, lining irrigation ditches and overall improvement of the efficiency of irrigation water management, and, as mentioned by Pain, on-farm trials using improved varieties of wheat.

One of the most enlightening conversations of the mission took place with a middle-aged farmer who had just returned to Logar Province after living as refugees in Pakistan for 22 years. Construction on a new home had just begun within 100 meters of the ruins of the old family homestead. "Having been away for 22 years, was there any challenge to your family's ownership of this land?" the farmer was asked. The farmer appeared shocked by the question and replied that such a challenge would be inconceivable. "Everyone knows what land belongs to whom," he replied. Considering that nearby villages along the Kabul-Logar highway had suffered considerable loss of life and physical destruction during the Russian occupation and the subsequent civil war, the mission was equally surprised to realize just how intact and conservative village organization had remained throughout it all.

Perhaps Adam Pain's suggestion that DACAAR had "little understanding of the underlying village social structure" misses the point. If a well-intentioned land reform campaign had led the country into a devastating period of anarchy and civil war within recent memory, perhaps DACAAR's technocratic fix-the-environment-not-the-social-structure approach to rural development reflects a great deal of wisdom about what is possible in rural Afghanistan today.

As an example of incisive livelihoods analysis, Pain cites Semple's (1998) study of livelihoods in Hazarajat that aimed to identify appropriate opportunities to support livelihoods during a time when, for example, "the terms of trade for bullocks and other animals against wheat fell by some 60-85% from 1990 prices as a result of distress sales of livestock." In other words, households whose assets and income were more pastoral than agricultural were more dis-advantaged, and therefore more in need of outside assistance. Coping strategies to avoid famine "included drawing on social support mechanisms, accessing distress foods, asset disposal (largely of livestock), increasing indebtedness through informal credit and migration strategies" (Pain, 2002, p.15). Pain concludes that one of the "key issues of livelihood support strategies is how to strengthen (and avoid under-mining) these coping mechanisms" (p. 15).

The utility of livelihoods analysis may be constrained by a lack of slack in the system. When the HAFO team accompanied the mission to interview recipients of seed aid in a village about 25 kms northwest of Ghazni, one farmer explained that the reason his field was parched and cracked, and the unlikely success of his newly-established wheat crop was that "I am only entitled to irrigation water for 45 minutes every 13 days." Neighboring, much better-established wheat crops had been planted in the fall, when this farmer was employed in a bakery in Karachi.

There seem to be three alternative pathways of rural development from which the aid community and the Government of Afghanistan can chose: