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Our Stand
By Daud Saba
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To date no specific environmental study has been
carried out in Afghanistan. The lack of information
on the quality, of air, water. vegetation, land and other
environmental factors could be attributed to the non-existence
of organizations or agencies devoted to this issue. Studies
revealed that at least until 2000 B.C, the land of Afghanistan was
covered with cedar rich forests, and had a different pattern of
climatic and life support system to that of its today.
The ecosystem in the territory of Afghanistan has never been
damaged to the extent of deterioration caused in the last
two decades. This trend is created by the unlimited use
of nature and its energy. Albeit, this environmental
degradation was enhanced by war.
Two thirds of the landscape of Afghanistan
is
occupied by mountainous terrain with no or little
vegetation, typical of an arid country. For this
reason the vegetation in these terrain play a vital
role in the ecosystem. For example if we consider the
role of pistachio (Pistacia Vera) among
hundreds of other floras, we find out that it does
not only provide climatic and environmental stabilization
over the areas of its growth, but ease the life of thousands
of families by providing them a natural source of income.
Half of the remaining parts
of the country’s landscape is composed
of deserts, which are hostile environments.
The rest is farmlands and pastures. At
present, only six percent of the fifteen percent
of agricultural land in Afghanistan is under
cultivation. In the past twenty years, the area of agricultural
land is drastically decreased. It is estimated
that we lost thirty percent of our farmlands and pastures,
either by abandoning or degradation of the
land, e.g. the farmlands in the province of Kabul
have been lost due to degradation resulted from
the expansion of the urban institutions.
This let to a drastic change of the previously
dominated climatic and environmental factors in
this region.
Compared to that of 1979, our agricultural farm
products have decreased fifty percent. To compensate
this loss, rural people started to utilize the free 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.
Due to this deforestation, flood and avalanches became
more devastating. Once the forest's productivity was
declined or monopolized by certain warlords, the
poor farmers sought another cheap and accessible
alternative. That was the cultivation of opium,
which encouraged by Afghan warlords and international
growing drug market, resulted in further degradation
of Afghanistan's environment.
Many forested areas and farmlands were burnt
and degraded by the use of heavy war technology and
chemicals. It is estimated that ten thousand villages
with their surrounding environment were destroyed.
This continuous process still takes its toll on our
environment.
The worst nightmare of the war created environmental
crisis in Afghanistan 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 mine field.
Only the human's life daily toll to these devices is
twenty to thirty persons, mostly children and civilians.
Through Afghanistan itself doesn't have any industry
to create air pollutants, smog is a common phenomenon
in most of the urban areas of the country.
Transboundary air pollutants is another concern.
Due to this, we receive enormous amounts of pollutants
originating from the
Ural sedimentary basin,
Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan's
industrial parks, located across our
borders. How much of the pesticides originating
form these countries and worldwide end up on our lands
and environment through air current and rains, is
another mystery of our environmental crisis. Chemical
weapons have been used during the Afghan war with
Soviets caused severe short-term damages to our environment
and ecosystem. No data exist on their long-term effects.
It could be concluded that at present the environment
in Afghanistan is in a deep crisis. The problems concerned
in this context is not only affect the people of Afghanistan
and their ecosystem, but the whole world. Any of the
components of the this system lost could not be
recovered at any cost, e.g. the capture
of a pair of Caspian Tigers (Panthera Tigris
Virgata), roaming in eastern Afghanistan mountains
in April 1997, may have
put an end to the survival of this highly
endangered and
almost extinct species of the cat on earth.
The people of Afghanistan are desperately in need
of help to repair their natural habitat and ecosystem.
The international community's responsible for giving them a
hand to revise this wounded piece of our common home, earth.
This article is an abstact from the orginally in Dari which was originally published in Mardom Nama-e Bakhter August 1997 (Issue 2 & 3). Permission for republication was granted byMardom Nama-e Bakhter editor Daud Saba. |
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May not be duplicated or distributed in any form without permission.