December 2002/
January 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Afghanistan's Natural Heritage: Problems and Perspectives

Daud Saba was born in Herat, Afghanistan in 1964. Presently living in Toronto, he received an MS in Economic Geology and Earth Sciences from Kabul Polytechnic Institute and studied toward a doctorate at the University of Bombay. This article first appeared in Lemar-Aftaab, 2001. The full text can be found at <www.afghanmagazine.com/2001/articles/nature.html>

In most parts of our country people typically live on the economic margins as nomads, small farmers and feeders, loggers, miners, wage workers, part-time hunters and foragers, traders, and even in households headed by women while men pursue seasonal work elsewhere. Their survival closely depends on their knowledge of local ecology. The existence of sharp differences in the kind of foods, fuels, or medicines that can be found or grown in different parts of the country results in similarly sharp differences in the knowledge--and hence the culture--of those inhabitants. . . .

Afghanistan mountain © Barbara Trott

The people of Afghanistan until mid-twentieth century kept their almost natural and self-sufficient way of living. We have not absorbed the environmental side effects of the industrialisation as directly as other countries in the world. However, the ecosystem in the territory of Afghanistan had never been damaged to the extent of deterioration caused in the last two decades. This is a trend created by uncontrolled and unlimited use of nature, triggered by the war. Consequently, the pre-war relatively balanced ecosystem and environment started to degrade at an unbelievable rate. In twenty years, this resulted in the seemingly uncontrollable environmental crisis in our history. . . .

War has led to water pollution, soil infertility and salination, deforestation, desertification, forced migration and resettlement, and the spread of environmental diseases, as is the case with any modern war in Third World countries.

The worst nightmare of the war-induced environmental problem in our country is the legacy of land mines. The presence of more than ten million land mines in the country makes it the world's most deadly minefield. The daily toll of these devices is 20 to 30 persons, mostly children and civilians--and that is merely the human life toll. The degradation of farmland and pastures by land mines forced millions of farmers and nomads to abandon their traditional activities. The burden of land mines is extremely heavy for nomads of Afghanistan, one fifth of the population. These people have adopted and developed a nomadic lifestyle for thousands of years, suitable for this terrain. Now they are facing a sudden change in their habitat and environment, which seems to be a tragic end to their natural livelihood.

So far, vast tracts of forested areas of the country are burned during the war. Farmlands were destroyed and degraded by heavy war technology and chemicals. More than ten thousand villages with their surrounding environments were destroyed.

In 1999, people in the province of Parwan, which is the most fertile region close to the capital Kabul, witnessed a mass burning of crops and mulberry trees. More than three hundred thousand inhabitants of this area were forcefully evacuated from their residences, while they were preparing for their crops to be collected. This is still a common practice as it was in the past twenty years of war in the country. . .

Compared to 1979, our agricultural products have decreased more than fifty percent. To compensate this loss, rural people started to utilise the free and uncontrolled natural resources of their environment. The end result of this process was a disaster for our few natural forests, which were cut and smuggled to Pakistan or used locally. Once the forest productivity had declined or been monopolised by a few warlords, the poor farmers sought another cheap and accessible alternative. That was the cultivation of opium, which was encouraged by market economy and assisted by Afghan warlords and the international drug market. This substantially enhanced further degradation of agricultural lands in very fertile regions of Afghanistan, such as Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

Recently, more and more traditional crops such as barley, wheat, and rice have been abandoned for crops that generate higher returns, namely opium. Surprisingly, by the coincidence of the right soil and climate conditions and the poverty of farmers, most of the world's cocaine, heroin, and opium productions are concentrated in three compact mountain regions. Among these producers, last year we broke the record in opium production and became the major producer in the world.

Although the price paid to farmers may prove irresistible, drug production and trade create enormous environmental and cultural devastation--namely, deforested hillsides, declining soil fertility, soil erosion, and water pollution, in addition to the ultimate harvest of drug addiction, AIDS, and violence among competing drug lords. Until 1995, we could rarely see a heroin addict in our society; today there is major drug use by our youth.

Archaeological studies revealed that at least until 2000 BCE the land of Afghanistan was partly covered with deep, cedar-rich forests. Today, except the Sulaiman Ranges that support comparatively dense vegetation due to Monsoon rainfalls, the rest of the Hindukush, specially the north and north-western extensions, support either sporadic vegetation of shrubs and bushes; or no vegetation at all. However in most of these valleys, the vegetation in the low and medium altitudes makes the livelihood and in some cases the only resource for the continuation of life.

Forests in Afghanistan occupy a very fragile mountain ecosystem and once lost, might not ever be restored. Over the course of these twenty years, the central governments of Afghanistan lost control over them and local commanders hold control of the forests. The bad news is that economic benefit of clear cutting overwhelmed most of these commanders and in this way wide areas of the forests were either clear-cut or partially cut to the extent that restoration of them may take more than a century, if it is possible at all.

While the forests are gone, in the past few years, the hotspot for some opportunistic foreign companies has been the mineral resources. Historical facts show that of all the economic activities in third world countries, nothing rivals the destructive power of mining, socially and environmentally. Environmental impacts include habitat destruction, increased erosion, air pollution, acid drainage, and metal contamination of water bodies. The cleanup cost of these hazardous wastes and restoration of the environment can easily reach to hundreds of millions of dollars, way beyond the means of these countries.

Sustainable development for Afghans is not a new concept. It was practiced for thousands of years in almost all traditional societies. Our ancestors understood it as a way of life defined by their conscious and spiritual connections to their natural surroundings. In our ancient societies, right was carefully matched with responsibility to each other and to the surrounding nature. However, this connection and bonding to nature was broken once we were pushed towards a more extractive and exploitative relationship with nature. Nature was to be tamed, conquered, and exploited not only for our basic needs, but also for the insatiable wants and greed of our foreign masters.

Today, looking from a community perspective at sustainability, the challenge is to involve the people once again in a process that looks at sustainable futures at the community level and making communities accountable for their own future. It is to gradually understand how we as a society can live within acceptable limits. It means relying more on our bio-region and less on the global market to supply our basic needs.

. . . For sustainability to work we have to do more than love our country in words. We have to love our physical land--the placenta of soil that nourishes us and upon which we depend. Without it, we will become extinct, as were the doomed people of Easter Island. Our land does not need us, but we do need it.

We are grateful to The Acorn for alerting us to this article<TheAcorn@earthlink.net> Richard B. Parker, 68 Washington Street, Camden, Maine 04843.

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