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Afghanistan: Farming

Before I come to the subject of this afternoon’s debate, I extend our sincere condolences to the family of Major Sean Birchall, who was killed in Helmand last Friday, the third Welsh Guardsman to be killed in action, and our profound gratitude to all the soldiers of my regiment and other servicemen who are risking their lives in a cause that is absolutely vital to the whole world—the maintenance and strengthening of a free and democratic Afghanistan. It is essential that we support them with the military resources that they need to defend themselves and the civilian population against the Taliban and, in particular, to deal with IEDs, the favourite weapon of the terrorists. Do we have access to the counter-IED technologies, on which the Americans are reported to be spending $4 billion a year? I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, on securing this debate and having dealt so effectively with the question of crop substitution. As she says, poppy cultivation reached an enormous peak of 8,200 tonnes in 2007, and the area under cultivation was also a record at 193,000 hectares in that year. But there are now hopeful signs. There was a reduction in 2008, and the business is concentrated in the seven provinces of the south and south-west, where the terrorists are still influential. The Secretary-General's special representative says that a further improvement is likely in 2009. With the extra 20,000 NATO troops, and the Afghan army also increasing in numbers and efficiency, there ought to be positive feedback, as the terrorists find it harder to coerce farmers into growing poppy, and to raise the taxes on their production, which is their main source of revenue. Crop substitution would make an enormous impact on the finance of terrorism, whether in the form of pomegranates, fruit and nuts or what seems to be the main alternative—wheat. At the same time, the relative economics of growing poppy and those other crops have changed. The EU special representative's April counternarcotics update quoted a local estimate from Helmand that wheat is now about 8 per cent more profitable than opium, and the report suggests that there may be a window of opportunity for alternative crop development, as the noble Baroness said. In 2008, DfID and USAID jointly issued free wheat seed to 32,000 farmers in Helmand, and it would be useful to know what the plan is for this year. We are also reviewing, with the Afghan Government, a new four-year programme to succeed the Helmand agriculture and rural development programme, to which DfID contributed £30 million over 2006-09 for infrastructure, including roads, wells—I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that water is of vital importance in this climate—and an agriculture high school. How far has the review of the programme progressed, and do we believe that it will achieve a permanent and sustained transfer from poppy to wheat cultivation in Helmand? The same report contrasted the huge success of governor-led eradication programmes in Helmand, which it says dwarfed those in all other provinces and were the highest ever recorded for GLE in 2008. This governor, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will confirm, is exceptional in Helmand, in terms of both his abilities and his incorruptibility. Does the Minister think that perhaps that is not the case with other governors of provinces where narcotics are grown or trafficked, and that some may either have active interests in the local narcotics industry or are not strong enough to challenge the authority of local narcotics traffickers? If so, do we have to acquiesce in the situation, or could there be a strategy for their replacement? Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy, has slated US eradication efforts as "wasteful and inefficient". If eradication is to continue, should it not be concentrated on the GLE rather than the poppy eradication force activities, which are costing more than a hundred times as much per hectare as the GLE and achieving less? Do the Government have a view on whether eradication should be done at all? If so, how should it be incorporated into development at provincial and district level, and who should do it? Do we also agree with Mr Holbrooke's call for, ""a very significantly expanded agricultural sector job-creation set of programmes involving irrigation, farmer-to-market roads, market places and seed".?" This seems to be the pattern in Helmand, where a month ago Mr Ian Purves, the UK's development co-ordinator in Garmsir, was showing journalists round the new bazaar, new tarmac roads, solar-powered streetlights and the refurbished school and health centre. The local farmers in and around the town are now growing wheat from seed distributed in 2007 instead of poppies. The Commander of the UK Task Force Helmand told the journalists that the local government and people had grasped the opportunity of better security to improve their living conditions, and the same could happen throughout the south as the Taliban is defeated. For the time being, according to DfID, Helmand still accounts for more than 50 per cent of the country's opium poppy cultivation in 2007-08 and was also the most important province in terms of heroin processing and trafficking. But provinces in the peaceful north, such as Badakhshan, now virtually poppy-free, also need help. Of the $32 billion spent by international donors in Afghanistan, only $8 billion has been channelled through the Government, and in Badakhshan the farmers say that they have had no help from either the Government or the aid agencies. UNAMA, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, is supposed to co-ordinate the aid programmes, but with those vast sums, a third of the population is still chronically food insecure. What is the Government's view on the transparency and accountability of these programmes, and can the Minister say whether any of the missing $24 billion not spent through the Government has been allocated to the promotion of alternative crops? Why is that not among the six core areas of UNODC's strategy? The DfID evaluation report published last month said that counternarcotics efforts are a combination of economic development, provision of social services, and better governance and the rule of law. It said that programmes such as the Afghanistan alternative livelihoods project and research in alternative livelihoods fund have made valuable contributions to producing alternatives to poppy. There is considerable effort to secure Afghan ownership of the programmes. We fund most of our alternative livelihood programmes through the Afghan Government and their agencies, and that must be the right approach in the long term. But the narcotics mafia has infected the Government themselves, with senior figures either using government institutions to run the business, or protecting the major narcotics traffickers. These traitors to Afghanistan would take ownership of counternarcotics efforts only in order to subvert them, as has happened, to some extent, with eradication. The quarterly report from NATO puts this in more diplomatic language when it says: ""Most of the ministries remain ineffective, under-resourced and lacking in skilled or experienced personnel, and this lack of institutional capacity makes it difficult for ministries to administer and disburse funds"." Are we using financial, developmental and military forces effectively to drive forward Afghan-led reform to clean up the Administration, and can these efforts succeed when President Karzai himself tolerates drug collusion by senior officials and even Ministers? The management response to the DfID evaluation says that both on the Afghan side and in DfID, the context has changed since the evaluation, and on poppy cultivation, a new initiative to sustain reductions is being developed by the Afghan Government with DfID's support, taking into account the lessons learnt from both successful and unsuccessful efforts to date. Could the Minister say how is this work progressing and, in particular, how the weak co-ordination among donors and the ineffectiveness of UNAMA and other UN agencies are being tackled? Can the knowledge and experience of counternarcotics that we have acquired be transferred to other donors, particularly to our 18 EU partners who are involved? Finally, does the Minister consider that PRTs have a useful role to play in counternarcotics strategy, bearing in mind their lack of an explicit mandate and, if any of them have done effective work, could that be continued by other agencies?