Czechs in Afghanistan, Pt. VII: The river gives and the river takes away

Emergency aid is the first step in humanitarian work in Afghanistan, but much of the north of the country is beyond that now – what the people there currently need is sustainable livelihood. In the seventh part of Radio Prague’s series on Czechs in Afghanistan, Czech humanitarian workers bring their business sense to the fields to help bring tangible, maintainable profits, sometimes in the midst of insurmountable disasters.

The mountains of Afghanistan end abruptly at Mazar-i-Sharif, then to the north they loom over the start of a broad, empty plain that becomes a desert near the Amu Darya River, one of the great waterways of Central Asia. From the muddy Afghan villages on the bank of the river you can see big buildings rising out of Uzbekistan across the water. The area we are in is called Shortepa, where a few thousand Turkmen live on a thin strip of arable land between the river and the desert.

North of Mazar-i-Sharif

There is water here, there are functioning schools for boys and for girls. Where humanitarian work turns in this situation is towards improving the livelihoods of people through sustainable activities: keeping bees, or raising orchards for example. This subsistence farmer has recently received an “input package” from the Czech charity People in Need - 1100 young trees that he will raise and sell for roughly 20 times their original price.

“So we provided an improved variety of these saplings from Mazar-i-Sharif for these people. Almond, apple and apricot trees.”

“And it takes about two years before the farmer will be able to sell them, right? So he will earn over 50,000 Afghani, like 1,000 dollars, for two years. And does he have to take care of the orchard? Is it a lot of work? How many hours does he spend on the orchard every month?”

“He spends three days per month. One of those days is spent irrigating.”

How much does it cost People in Need to provide this input package?

“65 or 70 dollars, for all of the trees.”

Shortepa

And Next year he will have a thousand dollars from them... How much does he make a year now?

“They are two brothers, together they have about 5,000 Afghanis per month.”

And how many people are in his family?

“18, with both of their families together. 9 people in his family. A big family.”

So for his family he has about 60 dollars a month, that’s two dollars a day, for nine people.

“Yes, two dollars a day, for nine people.”

Throughout Shortepa there are livelihood projects of all sorts slowly transforming the overall economic landscape, not just the situation for a certain family. Where People in Need constructs a 100 dollar greenhouse for a particular farmer, his neighbour sees the benefit and makes one as well. I’m interested in the process by which the projects are initially chosen, and international business consultant Pavel Přikryl explains it to me.

The Amu Darya river has divided the land in the background from the farm in the foreground in slightly over one year

“We do quite a detailed market survey which relies on data directly from the environment. So you need to know what the available natural resources in the area are, what the market potential of the beneficiaries’ final products is. And so there are two basic points with this market research. For one, you want to know which activities you should support in a given area, and how many beneficiaries there can be – you don’t want to have 50 beneficiaries of beekeeping, since the market would collapse and the price would go down. And secondly, we want to form something like business associations out of these individual beneficiaries. So for instance, beekeepers have many things in common that they can share in order to decrease the input price, or running costs, of their small businesses, and increase the profit. So, for instance, they can buy sugar to feed the bees together, they can transport the final product, the honey, to the market together, so that they share the costs of the transportation, and so that they increase the profit.”

As a business consultant who has worked in large multinational companies, it must be fascinating for you to see how all of this plays out on such a small, village and regional level.

“I am quite curious about that. But an economy works the same at the minimal level of having two beehives as it does in a multinational, multibillion-dollar company.”

While livelihoods take root and flourish in Shortepa, disaster in Afghanistan is never very far away, and there is nothing that the Czech charity organisation or any other can do to stop it. As decades of agriculture have removed the natural vegetation, one side of Shortepa is disappearing into the desert, while the other, more noticeably, is eroding into the river at the most shocking rate imaginable.

That was a piece of the riverbank falling away, right before our eyes. It’s really collapsing incredibly fast! What is causing this level of erosion?

“They cut down all the bushes and trees.”

The river is incredibly wide now, it’s maybe half a kilometre.

“This destruction occurred within a year and a half. There was another village here, it has already sunk into the river.”

This is happening all along the river, or only in this area?

“It’s happening all along the river.”

But who cut down the bushes and trees?

“These people. They were trying to create farmland. Now they plan to leave. They have had this land for a hundred years. They cut down the forest to create this farmland, now they will lose everything. It was fifty metres to the river one week before, now it is about 25 or less. So the river cut away like 30 metres in one week.”

And such are the obstacles that humanitarian work runs up against in Afghanistan; it can seem like where one problem ends, another, altogether more insurmountable one begins. Stopping the river from devouring Shortepa is no work for an NGO, but for an army, and one with millions, maybe billions of dollars at hand. As Pavel Přikryl points out, if this particular catastrophe was playing out in Europe, with 30 metres of farmland every week plunging into the Danube, say, it would be dealt with and attended to franticly as a disaster of unprecedented proportions. In Afghanistan it is simply one more tragedy.

Photo: author