Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-70)
MR DAVID
MANSFIELD
15 NOVEMBER 2007
Q60 James Duddridge: Christian Aid
uses the term you do not like but argues that there is considerable
scope for improving DFID's existing alternative-livelihood programmes.
What is your assessment of that assertion?
Mr Mansfield: Again, what is it
classifying under "alternative livelihoods"? I see the
national priority programmes as contributing to a CN outcome.
I have been helping with NRAP (the National Rural Access Programme)
which looks at how that might better maximise CN outcomes. There
is a range of different interventions in the portfolio that can
contribute. I just find the `AL'[14]
label an abstraction. I believe that people are talking about
different things at different times and it does not help. We should
be talking essentially about rural development and economic growth,
not using a term which you might use in a different way from me.
We constantly hear people say that they do not have enough money
in AL. Yet AL is the national priority programme. We are constantly
talking at cross-purposes. I find that an unhelpful term. As to
DFID's work, fundamentally I support the idea of national priority
programmes and the development of synergies between them. I think
it has also done various things in relation to the AALP[15]
in Balkh and Herat and the work that it used to do in Badakhshan
through its development forum. There are centralised national
programmes to be brought together so they work in a more synergistic
way, but you must also come up from the bottom with BDF[16]
and others to try to get communities empowered to make demands
of those programmes so they are not so top down centralised and
are more demand-led and responsive to communities' needs. That
is the challenge.
Q61 James Duddridge: What are your views
on the DFID programme to encourage the production of mint and
saffron and melon further north, for example?
Mr Mansfield: They are all essential
elements. There is a range of different interventions going on
across Afghanistan, looking at high-value horticulture. The Dutch
have GSE[17]
in Oruzgan buying up saffron. There are various interventions
by USAID.[18]
DFID is doing its own project with mint and saffron with Mercy
Corps and others. All of these are important elements in terms
of increasing the value added of horticultural production, but
they are not sufficient on their own. They are a necessary but
insufficient condition. To deliver a CN outcome and reduce dependency
on poppy cultivation in the Afghan economy will require a broader
effort based on economic growth, security and governance. They
are valid efforts.
Q62 James Duddridge: Paradoxically, at
a time when the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe is moving
away from paying farmers not to produce there is increasing talk
about paying poppy farmers not to produce. What is your view of
that, and is it sustainable?
Mr Mansfield: The mechanisms to
implement something like that are non-existent in Afghanistan
today. A farmer will not see subsidy; there are too many interlocutors
who will take their cut. Looking at the costs of implementing
it and the capacity to monitor it, the prerequisite is to have
some kind of state that is out there doing service delivery with
infrastructure. It is the same in relation to legal cultivation.
The prerequisite for any magic bullet is a well functioning state
across Afghanistan. We are not there.
Q63 James Duddridge: Lord Malloch-Brown
said that we were muddling along in relation to counter-narcotics.
Is it a somewhat naive view to assert that there is a single solution
and that whilst politicians would like that from what you are
saying it is not that simple; it is highly complex with a whole
range of solutions and we should not really typify what is happening
as "muddling along" rather than using a range of solutions
and experimenting with them and that will be much more effective
than a single new policy.
Mr Mansfield: It is an incredibly
complex environment. Where we have some successes you will see
a response in relation to the drugs business and wider livelihoods.
You constantly must evolve with the drugs business and the economy
of Afghanistan and the changing security situation. Whether or
not it is muddling along? After 10 years of doing this kind of
work I have sympathy for the phrase but I think we have a far
better understanding of the problem and what is required. There
are issues around what can be done in the current environment,
particularly in relation to the levels of insecurity. I am sure
you will hear from colleagues later that this is not just in the
south but in other areas. In 1994 a friend of mine who worked
for DFID did a one-month review in Afghanistan. When he came back
his political analysis was that the Taliban would remain a small
organisation restricted possibly to Helmand and Kandahar in the
south. By 1996 they had Kabul; by 1998 they were in much of the
country. I am wary of predictions about Afghanistan and any idea
that there is a unique solution. As soon as you come up with a
solution the situation has already adjusted. You must constantly
evolve, move and understand the context so you can shift your
responses.
Q64 Sir Robert Smith: Historically,
obviously agriculture has been a major part of the Afghan economy
and yet the NGOs are concerned that support for agriculture is
considerably under-funded. DFID does put money through the Ministry
for Rural Rehabilitation and Development which has related impacts
on agriculture, and 3% of the funding of the US goes towards agriculture.
Has agriculture been neglected by donors?
Mr Mansfield: The Ministry of
Agriculture has probably been somewhat neglected by the donors.
There has been a lot of investment in rural development. There
are more investments in relation to horticulture. USAID debates
how it is operated but has put a lot of money into RAMP[19]—I
cannot remember what the acronym stands for—which is an
agricultural marketing programme and then it is put into ASAP[20].
It puts a lot of money through its alternative livelihoods programmes.
A lot of it focuses on value chain work in the agricultural sector.
The emergency horticulture and livestock programmes of the World
Bank are quite significant. There have been whole issues about
working with the Ministry of Agriculture; it has been problematic
in terms of working with NGOs. It had a range of advisers who
were stuck in the old days of the collectives and wanted to provide
all kinds of price subsidies and have large tractor plants that
they could rent out. There has been a whole range of issues in
terms of working with the Ministry of Agriculture. From what people
are saying they appear to be working their way through. The agricultural
base of Afghanistan is fundamental, but if you consider what has
been successful in other countries you must also look at the non-farm
income side of it. If you look at Pakistan, Thailand and areas
where poppy cultivation occurred you see a process of movement
away from the land. In many areas of Afghanistan where opium is
most concentrated they cannot sustain the population with poppy.
There are such small land holdings and such high population densities.
People must move down from the hills. There is a natural process
of development where people move down to non-farm income opportunities
in urban areas. Agriculture is fundamental but that side also
must be considered.
Q65 Sir Robert Smith: Colleagues who
went north said that farmers had diversified into melons and then
the crop failed because of a melon flea. Wheat could be much more
productive with more inputs in terms of managing the crop. Are
skills and advice not being provided in that sense?
Mr Mansfield: What the Ministry
of Agriculture is doing out in the field is debatable. If you
go around looking at the ag-extension and provision of advice
and support clearly it is wanting. Much of that support comes
from the NGO community and through some of the large programmes.
A lot more can be done in those areas to pump-prime the legal
economy. I am a great fan of the Peace Dividend Trust. I do not
know whether you met them. There is an issue about local procurement
and the fact that we have PRTs,[21]
the military et cetera who fly in all this food when that money
could be put into the legal economy or used to pump-prime horticultural
production. Some people estimate that there could be $1 billion
worth of investment in the rural economy if the various military
and civilian forces bought locally. Efforts are being made there
by the Peace Dividend Trust. The US military used to spend $38
million on importing bottled water; it now buys locally. These
kinds of efforts could be helpful.
Q66 Chairman: In one village that we
visited a clean water supply had been installed for the villagers
and they had switched from poppy—they did not say so but
we got that impression—and were growing melons. They said
that the melons were failing and there was nobody who could advise
them how to deal with the problem, or whether they should grow
alternative crops. Their animals were suffering from a shortage
of drinking water. Again, they wanted an irrigation scheme and
there was nothing there. There seemed to be a clear gap. They
knew what they wanted but there was nobody to provide it.
Mr Mansfield: Yes.
Q67 Richard Burden: You have emphasised
the importance of constructing a functioning state in order to
get the integrated strategy that you think will be important.
That requires all sorts of things but certainly co-ordination
between different departments and so on. Where do you think in
all of that the 22,000 community development councils sit? How
effective do you think they are or could be in developing the
kind of strategy you are talking about?
Mr Mansfield: Again, that probably
takes me a bit outside my comfort zone. Given the nature of the
way I do my field work I tend not to engage too much with the
CDCs,[22]
but I am very much aware of some of the discussions that are taking
place around sub-national governance. I think they can be enormously
helpful as a development platform in terms of engagement with
them in understanding community needs and clustering CDCs. That
is very much what AKDN[23]
and others have been doing; they have been clustering them so
they can make the national priority programmes more demand-led.
I see them having a very important role, but the next witnesses
will probably be able to give you a far better idea.
Q68 Sir Robert Smith: We were told in
Helmand that some of the reduction in poppy in the past had been
to do with just shortages of water and given that the rains had
come back and the forecast was more rain we should not expect
any reduction in poppy cultivation in the province for the foreseeable
future. From your earlier answer you suggested that all the drivers
are for continued poppy cultivation.
Mr Mansfield: I go back to my
earlier comment about making predictions about Afghanistan. If
you look at poppy cultivation in Helmand today, economically it
is not very attractive. If you consider that people were paying
up to $20 a day for hired labour—most households have to
hire labour during the harvest period—it is an incredibly
labour-intensive crop. During the harvest season the requirement
is two hundred person days per hectare; it is 350 to 360 person
days for the crop as a whole from the point of preparation of
land to final clearing of the field. For harvesting you have to
get the right amount of labour at the right time and labour must
have the right skills. You do not want idiots doing it; they will
reduce your yields. When I was in Nangarhar I met people who were
going to Helmand because the wage labour rates were $20 a day
and they were getting a premium for working in an insecure environment.
If you calculate the net return on opium poppy, not the gross
returns that we are often presented with—for example that
poppy provides 10 or 20 times more return than wheat—it
is unattractive. Why do they continue to do it? They do it because
the trader goes to them. It is low risk and so it is a better
option for the farmer. Some households bring in share-croppers
who do the bulk of the work. Eighty per cent of the total cost
of opium poppy cultivation is labour. You need to find ways to
access cheap labour, and share-cropping is one way to do it. At
the current rates as an owner cultivator I am not making much
money from poppy but it is a nice low-risk crop in a high-risk
environment. If I am a landlord and I have share-croppers with
the provision of credit I can buy the crop early as a distress
sale at a low price. I am accessing their labour cheap because
of the nature of the share-cropping arrangement under which they
get 50% of the crop and I get the other 50% but they are doing
all the work, and I can sell the opium later in the season. I
can make money essentially from the surplus value of labour. Some
farmers can still maintain a degree of profit; others are just
managing risk. Too often we talk of these farmers as if they are
all profit-maximising. Farmers the world over look at what kind
of risk they can afford to take and manage it and within that
risk they try to maximise profit. Farmers in Helmand are no different
from farmers anywhere else in the world. Is it going to go up
or down? I will be able to tell you in about a month's time because
at the moment I have people there in various districts at their
own risk doing field work; they are looking at the process of
decision-making, so you will have to wait for that.
Q69 Richard Burden: Can you give
your impressions of the narcotics/insurgency link? I know that
it is difficult to define "Taliban", "insurgents",
"drug-traffickers" and "foreigners". That
is a complex area. When we were there we were told in very broad
terms that the Taliban, however defined, got between 20% and 40%
of its income from poppy and that figure has been bandied around
elsewhere. What is your assessment of that?
Mr Mansfield: I would be fascinated
to know the methodology. There are some clear links, but how strong
they are is under some debate. I see a significant shift. I used
to do field work during the days of the Taliban in Helmand, Kandahar
and various places where I would not even think to go now. I saw
an environment in which poppy cultivation thrived for a number
of reasons. First and foremost, I did an `apprenticeship' with
opium traders in the south; I spent three weeks looking at the
farm gate trade in Kajaki, Musa Qala and places like that. I would
meet traders who had been involved for many years. I asked what
had been the big change in the opium trade in the past 25 years.
They said that in the old days when the Mujahideen were in charge
there were checkpoints everywhere. They had camel bags on the
back of motorcycles—the sort of thing you can buy in Camden
market—and half would be filled with money and the other
with a gun. They would travel through the checkpoints and pay
money, so it was very difficult to operate. With the Taliban all
those checkpoints went so basically they could travel from district
x to the border and obtain a better return on the opium
they sold. In terms of trade it could expand. The argument was
that it was easier for them because there were a lot more new
entrants into the opium trade as a consequence because the security
environment allowed them to trade more easily. On the farming
side there was very little development assistance. There was an
ongoing drought and all the right ingredients for poppy cultivation
to increase. I did not see the Taliban encourage poppy cultivation;
I just saw a vacuum of governance essentially. Now I pick up from
field work, especially last year, that the "Taliban",
whoever they are, to a certain extent encourage poppy cultivation.
Is this about funding? Will the Taliban and insurgency go away
if the drugs go away? I do not believe that will happen, but I
think there is a play for hearts and minds. The Taliban are now
encouraging poppy cultivation to some extent to provoke a reaction.
What better propaganda coup than to provoke an aggressive eradication
campaign, particularly with spraying? You hear Afghan farmers
say that the foreigner cares about drugs but the priority for
them is security, employment and corruption. The argument that
you hear sometimes from farmers is that those issues are not addressed.
This is right or wrong; it is the perception of truth that counts.
The perception is that foreigners care about drugs and the Government
of Afghanistan is trying to get rid of them to help foreigners
deal with their drugs problem at home. If that is the perception
in rural areas and you come in with an aggressive eradication
campaign, what better way is there to win the hearts and minds
of rural population? I think the funding side is there but I am
sure they get their funding from all the usual sources with which
we were so familiar in the late 1990s. Is that the primary motive?
I tend to think not. I think it is about the hearts and minds
of the rural population. Sometimes we underestimate the "Taliban"
vision in some of this. They are more than able to look at the
strategic picture about how the drugs issue can be fought over.
Q70 Sir Robert Smith: Dealing with
what seems to me to be the madness of aerial spraying, presumably
in the nature of the cultivation it is not just serried ranks
of poppy fields that you can delineate and spray rather than food
production. Presumably, the spray does not just sit on the field;
it goes into the water courses. What are the practicalities of
aerial spraying?
Mr Mansfield: The science is debated
constantly in relation to what is being sprayed and subsequently
what its half-life is. How resilient is it in the soil? Does residue
stay within the water and so on? I am not qualified to go into
the science. The reality is that in Afghanistan very few people
mono-crop poppy. If you do typically it is because you have such
a small land holding, labour density and a certain number of people
where essentially the opportunity cost of labour is negligible
and you maximise poppy cultivation. Even so, there will be a small
amount of vegetable production for household consumption. Most
people grow a range of different things. Poppies are grown in
irrigated areas typically near the household compound as well,
so unless the accuracy of this process has reached a high level
it strikes me that you are bound to have `collateral damage',
which I think is the phrase.
Chairman: Mr Mansfield, you have given
us the scale of the problems inasmuch as what you are really saying
is that you would need to provide viable alternative crops, security
to trade them, alternative livelihoods and to some extent a functioning
state. That is a pretty challenging set of deliveries. Obviously,
that helps to explain why Afghanistan is such a difficult and
challenging problem. In particular, you have described the link
between insecurity and poppy production in that it brings the
purchaser to the farm if the farmer cannot leave. Thank you very
much both for your written evidence and the exchange this morning.
It has been extremely helpful.
14 Alternative Livelihood (AL) Back
15
Afghanistan Alternative Livelihoods Program (AALP) Back
16
Bakhtar Development Foundation (BDF) Back
17
Growing Sales Exchange (GSE) Back
18
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Back
19
Rebuilding Agriculture Markets Program (RAMP) Back
20
Accelerating Sustainable Agriculture Program (ASAP) Back
21
Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Back
22
Community Development Council (CDC) Back
23
Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) Back
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