Agriculture, Food and Poverty in Afghanistan

While there are no reliable statistics virtually any aspect of Afghan agriculture, there does seem to be broad consensus about the scale of the problem. A past DoD report on Afghanistan provided the unintentionally humorous statistic that some 60% of Afghans have enough food some of the time. A form of “spin” that ignored the obvious corollary that 40% of Afghans do not have enough food all of the time, and there was no way to know what part of the 60% had enough food often enough to matter.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was a great deal more frank – and useful – in its effort to address these issues in an April 2010 report based on a 14-province survey:

Poverty actually kills more Afghans than those who die as a direct result of the armed conflict either accidental, nor inevitable; it is both a cause and a consequence of a massive human rights deficit. The deficit includes widespread impunity and inadequate investment in, and attention to, human rights. Patronage, corruption, impunity and over-emphasis on short-term goals rather than targeted long-term development are exacerbating a situation of dire poverty that is the condition of an overwhelming majority of Afghans.

According to the report published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), some 9 million Afghans – 36 per cent of the population – are believed to live in absolute poverty and a further 37 per cent live only slightly above the poverty line, despite an estimated injection of some $35 billion during the period 2002-2009. Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world and the third highest rate of child mortality. Only 23 per cent of the population have access to safe drinking water, and only 24 per cent of Afghans above the age of 15 can read and write, with much lower literacy rates among women and nomadic populations.