Kabul – Approximately 80 percent of Afghanistan’s population relies on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. All across the country, rural households follow diverse and traditional systems of farming, using field crops and wild plants to feed their families and livestock.
These traditional farming and pastoral systems, developed over many centuries, have been forged and shaped by Afghanistan’s harsh physical and climatic environment. These have developed in a diversity of geographical, climatic and ecological conditions created by the mixed geology and topography of Afghanistan. They survive against all odds, subjected to many pressures of climate, geography and remoteness, the effects of increasing population on limited productive land and despite conflict, the lack of an enlightened government as well as the “need and greed” that leads to the abuse of natural resources and environmental degradation. These systems survive just because they are so well adapted to extreme conditions, but today they are threatened.
This “Introductory Guide to Sources of Traditional Fodder and Forage and Usage” aims to introduce Afghanistan’s teachers, students, farmers, field workers and managers to the cultivated crops, and wild fodder and forage plants that contribute to these complex traditional farming and pastoral systems. Many of the important crops that are an integral part of these systems date back some 10,000 years to the very beginnings of crop husbandry and the domestication of grazing animals during Neolithic times.
Given the country’s wealth of plant genetic diversity and history, its hoped that this guidebook will help educate and preserve Afghanistan’s unique farming and pastoral systems, as well as the plants that form their foundation.
Since 2002, UN Environment has supported the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to lay the environmental foundations for sustainable development. Across the country and at the national level, UN Environment and NEPA have worked closely to build environmental resilience at both the policy and practical levels, with a particular focus on ecological and ecosystem services to combat climate change, preserve biodiversity, and protect iconic landscapes.
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