中村哲医師特別サイト

In April, water began to rise throughout the Indus River basin. Turbid waters from snowmelt rushed into the great Kunar River which is a tributary. In no time, extreme heat will set upon the region. The nomads will migrate to the highlands, and the wheat fields will start to turn golden.

The amount of water the crops can receive before ripening greatly affects the harvest. Due to this fact, conflicts over water often arise around this time of the year. Our Marwarid Canal also increased the water supply volume to the fullest, to make sure that water reaches each and every village. It used to require a tremendous amount of effort to ensure sufficient water intake for the villages, after gauging the rivers’ water level.

However, in March this year, the long standing concerns were resolved when the new weir was completed after two years, elevating the entire channel floor with stone pavement. This new weir was connected to the existing Marwarid weir on the opposite side of the river. This continuous weir now has a length of 505 meters, with stones laid across an area of 25,000 square meters. It withstood record flooding last year, proving its strength. The technique for “stable irrigation” that we advocate, now has a firm foundation perfected over many years. This has been a great leap forward for the Green Ground Project.

■Unabated rural decline and the looming crisis

We could manage to supply water in abundance this year because of the construction of the intake system. Everywhere in the river basin, we witnessed a bountiful harvest and not a single case of water conflict. This was the outcome of the efforts carried out by PMS (Peace Japan Medical Services). On our farms, we also aimed for food security for all PMS staff and cultivated wheat across a wide area. By mid-May, our agricultural staff and the villagers got together and harvested 100 tons of wheat from 35 hectares of land, providing enough food to feed roughly one thousand people including PMS staff and their family members.

The water intake system, built by PMS will provide irrigation for tens of thousands of hectares and promises a good harvest for 600,000 farming families. We view this as a model for farming village recovery, setting the tone for our future efforts.

However, given the present situation in Afghanistan, we cannot be naively content with the success of our endeavors. The drought shows no signs of abating and in fact, the largest breadbasket to the south of Jalalabad has completely disappeared. The citrus crops which are usually abundant and are supplied across the country failed this year, and imports are now relied upon, for both citrus and wheat. After the crop failures, farmers started to flock to the big cities in search of jobs. The country’s fragile food supply is dependent on the circulation of foreign currency, linked to international aid and the ongoing conflict, which allowed them to import food from neighboring countries. However as the foreign troops withdrew, the people finally started to realize the importance of water intake technology.

The once self-sufficient agricultural production has declined sharply, and the people are increasingly threatened by escalating food prices. The food crisis was never reported widely, and what was heard instead was the focus on war and politics. The measures to stop desertification of the agricultural land, a matter of life and death for many people, are rarely highlighted.

This is a result of the disconnect from nature, the plague of modern society. In traditional Afghan society, people could live without money. The farmers who achieved self-sufficiency formed the majority of the population. However, that sector has been critically impacted by repeated droughts and floods due to climate change, and other countries' failure in employing proper mitigation measures. It is also influenced by the fact that western countries regard food as a “commodity.” They think that food-related crises can simply be solved by pouring more money into an economy. The actual production of food was not given priority. The impact of throwing buckets of money into the situation simply widened the desperate gap between the rich and poor.。

It has been more than a decade since the intense and devastating aerial bombing of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks in America. With the advent of the country’s “democratization,” the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) declared the end of their mission and troops have been pulling out one after another. What it actually means is, their defeat. There are very few media reports on the outcome of this military intervention.

Security in the country has never been worse. Anarchy prevailed anywhere outside the capital city. Among the people, there is an increased hostility towards the western countries which formed ISAF. The key industry of agriculture is on the brink of total collapse. The troop withdrawals will stop the inflow of foreign currency, which will lead to the starvation of half of the population. If the situation doesn't change, even if the war ends, Afghanistan will ultimately collapse due to the effects of climate change.

This is also our problem. Observing our “civilized world” from this frontier, we see ourselves standing at a major turning point. Where will we go from here? What should be left behind for the next generation? Now is the time for us to use our wisdom and question ourselves seriously. Much is certain that war is not the answer, and neither is economic growth.

I pray that PMS’s activities over the past 30 years, no matter how modest they are, can bring some light of hope also to our “civilized world.”

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This is a translation of a report from Afghanistan by Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese medical doctor who was gunned down on December 4, 2019 in Afghanistan at the age of 73. Dr. Nakamura was the head of the international NGO, Peace Japan Medical Services (PMS). In addition to medical services, PMS provides various forms of assistance to local communities in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, including the construction of irrigation systems, related agricultural programming and provision of food support. PMS is funded by Peshawar-kai, which was established in 1983 to collect donations from people and support the project implementation of Dr. Nakamura and his team.

This report is one of 27 installments in the series “In the Land of the Afghans – Reports from Dr. Tetsu Nakamura”, which ran from May 25, 2009 to December 2, 2019. These articles were originally published by the local newspaper in Dr. Nakamura’s hometown in Fukuoka, Japan. The text has been translated from Japanese to English, with the support of Peshawar-kai, by more than 30 volunteers, many of whom work in the field of humanitarian and development aid, and who have been and will continue to be inspired by Dr. Nakamura's work and philosophy.