Afghan Farmers Stabilize Eroding Slopes with Stones, Soil Ridges, and Native Plants

Farmers and landowners in six villages in the rugged mountains of the Gohr province in central Afghanistan are rehabilitating severely eroded watersheds that have suffered from years of harvesting of shrubs for fuel. They are installing a variety of practices to control gully and slope erosion and revegetating damaged areas with native species. Catholic Relief Services (CRS), founded in 1943 by the Catholic Bishops of the United States to help the poor and disadvantaged outside of the United States, is providing technical assistance with funding from the United States Agency for International Development.

This three-year village-based watershed restoration program, which began in January 2007, features an agreement between the communities, which average about 100 households each, the provincial government, and CRS.

“It recognizes that local residents own the land and have the right to manage and protect their land,” says Paul Hicks, a CRS staff member who has been working in Afghanistan since 2004. Based in Chagcharan, the provincial capital of about 13,000 people, he directs this integrated water development program. “Our goal is to help the landowners and those who farm the land understand and appreciate the value of not just building erosion control structures, but also protecting these structures permanently and seeding the stabilized areas to ensure the long-term benefits. Ultimately, the success of the work will depend on the commitment of the communities.”

Fighting Poverty
Government management and protection of watersheds and other natural resources collapsed during the war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the civil war, and, later, the Taliban rule. The number of former residents returning to the region following this turmoil has swelled since 2002, Hicks explains. This has put heavy pressure on the land in the form of unregulated grazing and wood gathering. With little or no vegetation to protect them, the hillsides are left vulnerable to heavy erosion from runoff of rain and melting snow.

“The amount of environmental degradation has accelerated quickly in the last decade,” he says. “Up until now, virtually nothing has been organized to stop this damage and to rehabilitate the land.”

Involvement of CRS in the erosion control work stems from its larger emergency relief and humanitarian assistance program for the province, which began about four years ago. CRS staff member Andrew Schaefer coordinates this program. “In trying to discover the root causes of the poverty and uncertain water supplies in Gohr, we couldn’t get away from the impact of soil erosion,” Hicks explains. “We began to realize that any long-term solution requires people to restore the watersheds, replant, and protect the soil.”

Restoring these watersheds will help reduce poverty by improving production of wheat for food and forage production, which, in turn, will boost livestock numbers, he notes. In the long run, watershed restoration is needed to help conserve water for increasing supplies for drinking and agriculture.

Willing Participants
“The farmers and landowners are aware of the problems, but they need help in coming together to develop a sense of common responsibility for sustainable land management,” Hicks says. “That’s a big challenge.”

So are logistics. Transporting supplies and materials over poor roads into these extremely remote villages is difficult, he notes. Efforts to monitor threats from local criminal and anti-government groups also detract from the restoration programs. “All the development actions in Afghanistan could be much more effective if we didn’t have to work around security threats,” Hicks says. “Our approach is very low key. None of the staff members are armed. Like other non-government assistance organizations in this country, we’re just trying to do quality work with a low profile.”

On the plus side, he has been heartened by the motivation of the farmers and landowners to rehabilitate their watersheds. “I’ve been impressed that so many people are very eager to get involved with our program,” Hicks says. “In most cases, they are stepping up and offering their land for our projects. That’s especially true of the older people who have seen the damage to their watersheds and the resulting problems. They are willing to take their land out of production for a while to restore it.”

The fact that most of his local staff also speaks English helps Hicks communicate with project participants, even though he does have a rudimentary knowledge of the region’s Dari language.

Demonstrating the Techniques
Nearly all of the CRS technical staff advising farmers and landowners in the six communities are Afghans. They include engineers, soil and water conservation technicians, and a botanist. “The program has been supported by some exceptional external consultants, including David Gandhi, a watershed restoration specialist from India,” Hicks says.

The first step in the watershed restoration work involves mapping the area’s water-related resources. Working with the villagers, staff members identify sites, usually no larger than about 15 hectares (37 acres), that are appropriate for demonstrating various erosion control practices. “These sites allow the landowners to see just what they can do to help protect the soil and water,” Hicks says. “We’re demonstrating different options they can use to reduce erosion and to harvest water by improving soil water infiltration.”

These practices, similar to those used by other development organizations in various parts of Afghanistan, include the following:

• Contour trenches: Designed to slow runoff on grazing land, they allow water to percolate into the soil, recharging ground water supplies. They are placed about 5 meters (16 feet) apart, vertically.
• Bunds: These are made by mounding soil into small ridges or contours. By slowing runoff they also promote infiltration. “We try to space them about 15 meters (almost 50 feet) apart, vertically, to provide enough room for pulling plows with cows without taking too much land out of production. In addition to saving water, they encourage farmers to plow across the slope, rather than up and down, which, by itself, can do a lot to slow water flow, reducing erosion.”
• Gully plugs: Constructed of stones, these simple structures are installed from the top of the gully to the bottom. They help slow water runoff and provide microsites for vegetative growth.
• Revegetation: Using native seeds gathered from other areas of the province, the villagers plant shrubs with deep taproots to hold soil in place and perennial grasses to help control erosion, while also providing forage for livestock. “We’re negotiating with landowners to keep livestock off of these areas for a couple of seasons to give the vegetation enough time to become established. Our goal is for them to manage the land in a way that allows enough time for the forage to recover between grazing periods.”

Training the Trainers
The technical staff provides hands-on training in erosion control principles to two local residents, who have been selected by the village watershed committee. Once trained, these two crew leaders direct the landowners, farmers, and laborers in constructing the appropriate erosion control structures to meet specific standards.

Those working on the projects are paid the equivalent of $4.00 (US) per day. “This money helps participants pay their crop production expenses and buy food and fuel to get them through the long, hard winters,” Hicks says.

The program also includes training of the technical staff. CRS has sent eight local staff members to a month-long intensive training workshop in Nepal on low-cost water conservation methods.

“Part of the CRS multi-year strategic plan for Afghanistan, which also includes other types of agricultural development and rural education programs, involves using our resources to build up the technical capacity of our staff,” Hicks says. “This training will add to the sustainability of these projects.”

Eager Students
When it comes to learning about soil and water conservation practices, the farmers and landowners have proven to be quick learners. That’s because they are used to working with scarce supplies of water, he reports. “The participants in this project are incredibly sharp,” says Hicks, who has directed CRS agricultural development programs in other regions of the world. “Here, more than any other place I’ve worked, they pick up concepts very quickly. Even those who are illiterate understand the principles intuitively.”

Based on results of similar erosion control practices promoted in other parts of Afghanistan, CRS expects this project to begin showing results within a year or so. “It’s amazing how resilient this land is and how quickly it recovers if you can delay grazing and the cutting of shrubs for even just one season,” Hicks says. “On one hillside demonstration project, we put in contour trenches, planted 28,000 trees and shrubs, and kept people and livestock off of it for four months. In that time, a big flush of grass had grown, and the shrubs had to be trimmed back because they were starting to shade out the tree seedlings.”

Plans call for expanding the program to a total of 30 communities over the next three years. At the same time, Hicks is hopeful that each village will apply the techniques and lessons learned in the demonstration sites to other areas of their watersheds. “Ideally, the communities themselves will expand the use of the soil- and water-saving practices as they see the benefits of managing these resources in a sustainable way.”

About the author: Greg Northcutt is a freelance writer covering the erosion control industry for nearly 20 years.

Greening Up the Brown Slopes

A key member of the local staff of Catholic Relief Services’ watershed restoration project in Afghanistan’s Gohr province is Mahmud Biparwa. A native of the province, he earned a master’s degree in botany at the Ukraine Agriculture Academy in the early 1980s with a focus on forestry and forest management.

As the staff’s technical advisor for agricultural and natural resource management, he is in charge of restoring native plant populations in the watersheds. “Mahmud is an incredibly dynamic guy—lots of knowledge and a great sense of humor. I’ve learned a lot working with him. He’s very hands-on in working with communities to collect seeds and plant them to revegetate the hillsides,” says Paul Hicks, CRS project director.

The species being used by farmers and landowners to stabilize the slopes include the following:

Trees
Willow (Salix afghanica)
Black Poplar (Populus nigra)
Pistacia atlantica

Shrubs
Bushy wild almond (Amygdalus spinosissima)
Cotoneaster afghanica
Wild cherry (Cerasus fruticosa)
Amygdalus communis
Cousinia sp.
Wild alfalfa
Kochia prostrata

Grasses
Afghan feather grass (Stipa sp.)
Crested wheat grass (Agropyron deserturum)