Replacing Moslem Despair With Hope Through Food Security
October 25, 2001
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Famine is stalking the Moslems of Afghanistan, as famine has stalked the arid Moslem landscapes so often in the past. The ferocity of today’s Moslem extremists mirrors the historic harshness of the Middle East and its precarious food supply. To promote stability, one major task facing the United States and the United Nations is to sharply improve food security in arid Moslem countries.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are in the midst of the worst drought in at least 30 years. Even their normal rainfall is inadequate to grow most crops, so their farm output always depends primarily on snowmelt from the region’s high mountains. The snows have been scanty the past three years. The two countries will be short of the grain they need by perhaps three million tons this year. Millions of cattle, sheep and camels on the Afghan plains are dying for lack of feed.
Twenty years of constant warfare have destroyed nearly half of the hand-built irrigation systems on which Afghanistan’s food depends.
In Pakistan, silt buildup behind the irrigation dams has cut farm water supplies by one-third in the same two decades while the country’s food demand increased 50 percent. Salts are also inexorably building up in these countries’ irrigated farmlands, gradually poisoning the soils and making farming less and less productive.
Half a million Afghanis have been getting much of their income from 200,000 acres of opium poppies, and that awful and illegal enterprise will now be stopped by international decree.
Fortunately for the future of Moslem societies, important new farming technology is on the way.
One of the best new farming systems is called “low-till.” In the past, Asia’s irrigated rice/wheat farmers had to plow their rice fields 6 to 12 times after each rice harvest to rebuild the flooded soil structure for dry-season wheat. The plowing takes weeks and loses much of the organic matter and moisture from the soil.
Low-tillers use herbicides to control weeds instead of plowing. Low-tillers simply make one pass over the field, putting the wheat seeds and fertilizer through a slit into the soil cut by a rolling knife. The standing rice straw is left undisturbed, so its roots prevent wind and water from eroding the soil. The rice roots also provide channels for moisture to infiltrate instead of running off.
Low-till wheat matures three to four weeks earlier, before the hottest and driest weather can shrivel the grain. It saves 30 to 50 percent of the water needed for plowed wheat and radically reduces the need for tractor fuel.
Low-till has become increasingly popular in North America since 1975, and farmers in India and Pakistan now discover it works for them. They planted only about 7, 500 acres of low-till wheat as recently as 1998, but they’re expected to plant 750,000 acres to low-till next spring and a possible 2.5 million acres within a few years.
In the longer term, most of the Moslem world is likely to benefit from new genetically engineered crops that take salts out of the soil in which they grow and store them in their leaves. Farmers will be able to harvest their tomatoes and oilseeds, and then go back and harvest the salts for industrial use improving their crop prospects for future years while gaining a new cash income source.
There’s also an international Future Harvest farm research station in Syria, but this low-key effort needs more funding and more extension agents in other Moslem countries.
Peace itself will greatly increase food production in Afghanistan by allowing farmers to rebuild their irrigation systems. Sites for catchment dams have been identified, to slow the spring runoff and help recharge the wells and reservoirs.
However, improved infrastructure remains the most sure-fire way to brighten the Afghan future. Better roads would help enormously to market more of the tree fruits and nuts that are Afghanistan’s best cash crops: raisins, apricots, mulberries, walnuts, and almonds. There are huge and growing consumer markets in neighboring Pakistan and India.
Better roads would allow relief supplies in future droughts while helping nomadic herders get better livestock breeds and medications. Higher reproduction rates would mean more meat and hides marketed from Afghanistan’s vast grasslands.
Environmentally, roads would cut the cost of importing fuel oil, and save the eastern Afghan forests, now being cut for firewood.
Roads would also help create off-farm jobs. This in itself would be a great impetus to stabilizing the region. (The Irish Republic Army refused to lay down its arms until the expansion of Ireland’s computer industry made the guns irrelevant.)
In the Middle Ages, Moslem culture gave Europe a shining example of good government, scientific advancement, and artistic achievement. Until today’s Moslem countries can offer their common citizens more hope for better lives, we are unlikely to break the cycles of poverty and violence that have too long betrayed the ethics of a great religion.
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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