T he Pamir Mountains rise seven kilometers above sea level. On the summits which separate Tajikistan from China-Communism Peak (7495m) and the Peak of Revolution (6974m)-as well as the highest points in Afghanistan-Nowshak (7485m) and Tirgaran (6843m)-lie both the source and the solution to many of Central Asia's challenges: snow. After the ice caps are weighed down by winter powder, spring melting fills streams that feed the Vakhsh, Bartang, Kowcheh, and Vakhan tributaries, and eventually the Panj River. Millions of people in the Aral Basin depend on this water.

Hydrologist Marc-Andre Bunzli suggests that air pollution in South and Southeast Asia and global warming are contributing to a "drying of Asia."1 Indeed, in contrast to South Asia, where flooding has become more frequent, drought and high temperatures are increasingly common in the shadow of the Hindu Kush and Pamir ranges of Central Asia. This change in climate has the detrimental effects of reducing rainfall and snow drainage, and of increasing water.2

Much of the Vakhsh and Panj water that does make it into the Aral Basin is either held by the Rogun dam and other unfinished hydroelectric power projects, or diverted by large, inefficient irrigation systems for cotton production.3 On the Afghan side of the Panj, the Kunduz-Khanabad Irrigation System, a project sponsored by the World Bank and the government of India that was never completed, diverts large amounts of water for rice growing at Kunduz.4 Several years of drought induced the erosion of river banks and levees.5 When rains finally returned to the Panj Valley, flooding wiped out large portions of the new crop.6

The Afghan and Tajik civil wars, which ended only recently, killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated regional infrastructure and economies, leaving many families unprepared to cope with crop failures. Today, as a result of inefficient agricultural systems and drought, nearly 5 million people in the region depend on foreign food aid even though they live at the continent's main water source. Although aid agencies have provided enough assistance to prevent massive starvation in Central Asia and have helped the governments begin to recover from war, the root causes of food shortages require deeper intervention. Only after governments, locals, and aid organizations make the correct investments to secure water access for the poor will famine conditions be permanently averted in the region.

WATER AS A HUMAN RIGHT

Famine can be defined as an emergency in which large numbers of people die due to malnutrition-related infections and disorders. Without the correct amount and variety of food, the human body relies on existing muscle and fat for energy. While few people die because of insufficient calorie intake during famine-sufferers often resort to eating unconventional foods like weeds-most succumb to infections their bodies no longer have the capacity to fight. In his book Poverty and Famines, Amartya Sen shows that famine conditions are not just a product of drought and food shortage, but also of rights disparities.7 Conflicts like those experienced in Central Asia over the last three decades only exacerbate disparities between economic classes, genders, and social groups, which can lead to breakdowns in the affordability of and access to basic household goods in times of need.

Securing people's right to food-as protected by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which both the Afghan and Tajik governments are signatories-is key to reducing famine conditions, particularly in poor communities. The right to water, which is protected under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and within the region's Islamic tradition, serves as the legal foundation for food security strategies such as market intervention, land reform, employment protection schemes, and the distribution of food during shortages.8

If the collection and distribution of snow drainage, rain water, and ground water function in such a way that benefits some more than others, then those who lack access to water can produce less food on the land they have and may be forced to leave that land during a drought to seek other sources of livelihood. If they are workers without property and are dependent on larger land owners, they may find themselves laid off during a drought and obligated to migrate in search of food and income. Furthermore, if households must resort to consuming unclean water from sources such as ditches or streams, they may succumb to water-borne infections like cholera or dysentery.

An important small-scale method of protecting water access and quality is water harvesting, which consists of using water catchment and storage systems when households have the space and resources to install them. By storing water, landowners and sharecroppers are generally able to continue watering their crops adequately during times of drought, in addition to safely covering their household needs. Broader interventions for water rights protection require cooperation with local authorities, as well as long-term research and investment in dams, reservoirs, irrigation projects, well-boring, piping, and water purification systems.

Comprehensive water rights protection cannot be secured by human rights advocates and relief teams alone, but must be addressed by governmental and non-governmental policy makers, as well as specialists in development, agriculture, construction, and hydroelectric energy. The Afghan and Tajik governments have a legal duty to protect water access for children and their parents and, therefore, to summon whatever assistance they can to achieve such protection.9 Now that violence in the region has largely subsided, the primary barrier to water security is a lack of funding.

FROM WATER RIGHTS DISPARITIES TO HUNGER AND INFECTION IN THE PANJ VALLEY

Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Pamiri minorities live on both the north and south banks of the Panj River, the waterway that has served as the border between the Russian-influenced world and Afghanistan since 1896. Villages and towns throughout this valley, from Kunduz to Kurgan-Teppe, are interdependent. They share water resources and have a history of trading across the river. During communist rule, each population endured multi-faction civil wars, as well as collectivization and land redistribution schemes which favored large agriculturalists over small farmers. However, from the standpoint of international law, humanitarian aid, security, and local politics, the Tajik north bank and the Afghan south bank could not be more divided. As most policy makers approach food security and water rights issues through separate programs on each bank, local communities lack the mutual benefit of trade ties and cooperative water agreements that a cross-border comprehensive water-system intervention might stimulate.

Conflict in the region has had several immediate effects. Heads of households were often relocated to fight and were sometimes killed or disabled in the wars. Combat damaged homes and chased people from their land. Families who return after war may not know whether their land is littered with landmines. In some cases, the new governments of Afghanistan and Tajikistan have rearranged the entitlement system, providing favors for some families and leaving others without the ability to participate equally in the economic system. In Afghanistan, where many displaced families were prematurely encouraged to return home when fighting ended in the north of the country, many households found it difficult to cultivate their land, even with the provision of seed from aid agencies, because of the presence of landmines and their lack of control over water resources.10

In the Afghan province of Badakhshan along the Panj River in the extreme northeast, maternal mortality rates were reportedly as high as 64 percent, with 6,500 mothers dying during child birth in 2002.11 The child mortality rate in Afghanistan has risen to 25.7 percent of all births; there are currently 309,000 child deaths per year throughout the country.12 The most common aggravating factors in maternal hemorrhaging and child illness are malnutrition and water-borne infection. In good times, an average Central Asian meal of pilau consists of lamb, raisins, nuts, lemon rind, seasoning, and rice. The poor consume rice with onion and turnips. During drought, families may eat plain rice or resort to cakes of grass and weeds with flour or "patak", a root that can cause paralysis.13 Mothers and children, the primary victims of malnutrition, are easy targets for infections. In 2000, UNICEF reported that only 17 percent of Afghans had access to safe water and only 10 percent had adequate sanitation.14

In 2002, Ahm and Shobair of the World Health Organization estimated that the current drought "has imposed negative impacts on at least half of the population. Three to four million people are affected severely; eight to twelve million are under threat of famine and starvation. An estimated 700,000 people have abandoned their houses in search of food, water and fodder (pasture); around 300,000 have fled to neighboring countries and more than 400,000 people (IDPs) have moved to the closest and safest places."15

At the end of this drought cycle, even after the Kunduz region recovered normal agricultural production in 2002-2003, over 65 percent of people in the nearby regions of Dowshi, Farkhar, Rostaq, Badakhshan, and the Wakhan Corridor remained dependent on foreign food aid.16 From 2002 to 2003, the World Food Programme still supported 3.9 million Afghans, or 20 percent of the population, including 324,000 children in school feeding programs.17 Dependence on food aid can only be reduced when the poor are able to participate actively in local markets. Efficient and equitable water systems are prerequisites for the health of those local markets.

Like Afghanistan, the mountainous nation of Tajikistan depends on other countries for food, growing only 40 percent of its cereal needs in 2001.18 During and after the 2000-2001 drought, the World Food Programme estimated that approximately one million Tajiks, or 14 percent of the population, faced hunger. "Even a minor environmental disaster could again send many into acute starvation," the International Crisis Group suggested.19 In Tajikistan, where malnourishment affects 47 percent of the population, food production is severely threatened. The child mortality rate rose to 126 deaths per 1000 children under five in 2002.20 Today, only 51 percent of the population has access to clean water.21

The International Crisis Group describes the Soviet irrigation system-which was built almost exclusively for cotton production-as so badly decayed and damaged that it loses most of the water it is meant to carry. Meanwhile, the government has moved slowly in land reform. Crop diversification faces opposition by cotton oligarchs, and land redistribution has largely been unfair. The International Crisis Group underlines this inequity, quoting an interviewee in Gharm:

"A sovkhoz consisting of 180 families in the Jirgatal district was distributed among only 30 households. The remainder of the households in this rural area are now essentially landless and must strip rain-fed land in the mountains for sustenance, leading to erosion."22 Without adequate land and water access, the poor remain without protection against drought. Combined with perceptions of an unjust land redistribution, water insecurity can lead to distrust between groups and fear of local market failures. Protecting water rights for the poor is therefore key to political stability.

GOVERNMENTAL AND NON-GOVERNMENTAL APPROACHES TO WATER INSECURITY IN THE PANJ REGION

In 2003, the Afghan government estimated that the cost of national recovery from the war would amount to at least $15 billion over the next five years.23 International organizations estimated that recovery would cost at least $10.2 billion, yet only $5.2 billion was pledged by governmental donors, and of that, only $2.1 billion has been disbursed and $191 million spent.24 Rubin, Hamidzada, and Stoddard of the Center on International Cooperation argue that international spending, "has gone overwhelmingly to the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban (84 percent), with 9 percent for humanitarian assistance, 4 percent for the International Security Assistance Force, and 3 percent for reconstruction."25

During the worst drought on record in 2001, UN-coordinated humanitarian aid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan totaled $5.5 million. The following year, after the Taliban government had fallen and spring rains had inundated the desiccated fields, the number rose to $1.6 billion.26 This partially had to do with international sanctions and dissatisfaction with the Taliban regime, as well as overwhelming support for the succeeding interim government of Hamid Karzai. Although human rights played a major role in much aid abstention before December 2001, it is not clear whether social justice affected the lack of support for water system renovation, which came so quickly afterward.

Direct agriculture and water sector assistance from 2000 onward never achieved more than 9 percent of the UN's Consolidated Appeals for Assistance Funding to Afghanistan, whereas up to 83 percent came in the form of foreign food aid, mostly subsidized EU and American surplus grain and seed.27 Afghanistan has a history of strong wheat and rice production. In the past, certain areas such as Kunduz produced enough rice that excess quantities could be exported to other countries.28 In the long run, drought and flooding should only cause temporary dips in grain market supply after proper reconstruction. The end of political violence in most of the region and the expansion of humanitarian assistance programs into new areas has given thousands of people confidence to return to their farms, which historically produced wheat, rice, potatoes, turnips, and other foods.

Meanwhile, most aid agencies have been delivering expensively-shipped foreign food parcels to these families while their own wheat fields lie fallow. If a fraction of the funds used on these shipments of surplus grain from the U.S. and Europe were used to purchase food within the region and stimulate nearby markets instead, local farmers would have greater incentives to revitalize their farms. These shipments can deter active farmers from continuing to produce, as cheap or free foreign grain pushes down local market prices to prohibitively low levels at which producers cannot cover their production costs.

The Afghan Deputy Minister for Irrigation and Water Resource Management, Pir M. Azizi, has addressed many parties about the water situation in Afghanistan. Like the Afghan Minister of Finance, Ashraf Ghani, Azizi makes overtures to donors and contractors abroad in an attempt to bring them to work on irrigation schemes, dams, and other projects such as the Kunduz-Khanabad Irrigation System, Salma Dam near Herat, the Sarder Ghazni Dam and Irrigation Project in the center of the country, the Kokcha Irrigation Project in Takhar Province, the Khushtapa-Good Hill Project near Mazar-e-Sharif, and the Cheshma Shafar-Healthy Spring Project on the Balkh River.29 The prevalence of partially developed projects proves both the historical commitment regional governments have made to the agriculture sector and the lack of resources they have to complete such projects.

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has actively assisted the Afghan government to tackle water issues. USAID provided funding for 500,000 farm families in 2003, with the aim to improve water efficiency for 615 irrigation projects. Local crews with USAID funding completed the reinforcement of the Sar-e-Haus dam at a reservoir serving 40,000 in Faryab Province. Future plans include renovating the Moghul Khil and Mohammad Agha canals in Logar, the Nari Karim canal in Lagman, and the Zana Khan and Sardeh dams in Ghazni. USAID also funneled $1.7 million to partners for water supply and sanitation in Kunduz, Kandahar, and Kabul. The Kunduz effort targeted 150,000 people.30 This demonstrates the new interest foreign donors have taken in water security in Central Asia, but these projects represent only a fraction of the input required and have targeted primarily large irrigation projects in a region where many do not share access to these projects.

On 30 August 2003, Tajikistan hosted the International Fresh Water Forum in Dushanbe with representatives from governments, organizations, and agencies from over fifty countries. President Rakhmanov pleaded with delegates for help in solving Tajikistan's hunger issues.31 Like Azizi, the Tajik Minister of Land Reclamation and Land Resources, Abdukohir Nasirov, has attempted to woo foreign donors into assisting the government to rebuild old irrigation projects, dams, reservoirs, and bridges. His team faces similar challenges to those in Afghanistan.32 Although civil war in Tajikistan took place over a shorter period of time than it did in Afghanistan, its effects are still felt in the form of regional rivalries. The Panj north bank survives under de facto control of three sub-groups, which do not always cooperate with each other over the use of land and water.

In 2002, Nasirov's team in Tajikistan benefited from a $35 million loan to Tajikistan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) primarily aimed at water management.33 Although investment in the rehabilitation of three southern irrigation systems which supply at least 85,000 hectares of land with water is exactly what the Ministry asked for, the loan increased Tajikistan's nearly $1 billion foreign debt. The nation's annual budget hardly exceeds $200 million. The ADB-funded project targets 87,000 people and may include piping to reduce water-fetching time.34 As in Afghanistan, donor interest in water security has grown but has not reached adequate levels to ensure that hunger will be prevented during the next drought. One of the largest projects in the region is the completion of the Rogun hydroelectric dam, which many believe will help Tajikistan's economy catch up to others in the region through the harnessing of Pamir water flow to generate electricity for export.35

From 2000 to 2003, food aid accounted for 78 percent of UN-coordinated humanitarian assistance to Tajikistan while direct agricultural, water, and sanitation funding made up only 4 percent.36 To combat hunger in the country, a team led by the UN, Action Against Hunger, and Mercy Corps International, undertook a comprehensive study called the National Nutrition and Water and Sanitation Survey in 2003. The study concluded that while sudden or acute malnutrition had decreased to 4.7 percent of the children studied after several years of intervention, approximately 36.2 percent of children still suffered from long-term or chronic malnutrition.37 Agencies like those involved in this study have long dedicated programs to the protection of water rights and have targeted the poor in particular with water harvesting assistance and the rehabilitation of small wells and irrigation systems. Nevertheless, the full eradication of hunger in the region will require interventions of a larger scale.

The Aga Khan Foundation created the local NGO Mountain Societies Development Support Programme (MSDSP), possibly one of the greatest successes in water security in the region, based in Khorog, Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, in 1993.38 Since then, the Aga Khan Foundation has donated or funneled a total of $150 million into Tajikistan assistance programs, primarily for Pamir Ismaili communities in the autonomous eastern part of the country, but also for building bridges into Afghanistan through contracts with Badakhshonroh Construction and Pamir Geology.39 Combined local and foreign efforts reduced severe acute malnutrition in the Gorno-Badakhshan region to the lowest in the country at 0.1 percent of the children studied.40 Assistance organizations like the Aga Khan Foundation have taken the lead in protecting water rights for the poor in Central Asia, but only after planners and donors apply this concept to broader infrastructure and rural development will famine conditions fade.

PREVENTION OF HUNGER THROUGH APPROPRIATE INVESTMENTS IN WATER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Hunger alleviation programs in the Panj Valley serve as examples of how aid agencies have taken the lead in protecting water rights for the poor in a post-conflict environment. An analysis of the reasons people are hungry there shows, however, that those affected by hunger depend more on the broad decisions related to water by policy makers in the region than on aid agencies. Although adequate long-term investment in drought protection for the poor can prevent emergencies from taking place, governments often rely on relatively brief humanitarian action to reduce starvation during crisis. The Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University has advised actors in the region that additional effort should be applied to making the next harvest succeed.41 This may mean investing a higher percentage of funding in the agricultural sector than is traditionally intended by donors, and stimulating areas beyond the drought or flood zone.

If it is inevitable that the greatest quantity of funding comes at or after a crisis rather than when prevention is possible, policy makers can target portions of that money to emergency development interventions. There are hundreds of agencies already urging and carrying out these reforms. USAID programs could afford to fix at least five large water projects in Afghanistan and eight pumping stations in Tajikistan by including emergency development assistance within the 2002 Consolidated Appeal (CAP). If agriculture and water sector funding for Central Asia were a higher priority for emergency aid, would malnutrition and the necessity for food aid decline in the long run?42

Families from remote regions like the Badakhshan provinces of Tajikistan and Afghanistan remain in dire need of water security, even after famine conditions have subsided in other areas, and do not usually benefit from large project rehabilitation systems or gain access to relief distribution points. By training local farmers in soil sciences, water surveillance, and uses of water harvesting equipment, and by helping them to "trade up" from hand work to plow animals, and from plows to tractors, governments and assistance organizations could protect the poor from drought more successfully.

Development successes in Central Asia such as the Aga Khan Foundation's work in the Tajik province of Gorno-Badakhshan may prove to be important models for other post-conflict cross-border recovery zones where hunger is prevalent. However, until major humanitarian donors either act faster or with greater foresight, many people may suffer while waiting for long-term rehabilitation to take effect. If policy makers consider the threat to stability inherent in food shortages and disease, then they may see that an adequate investment in water security for the poor can yield a more healthy community for all groups over the long run.

REFERENCES

1 Marc-Andre Bunzli, "The Drying of Asia," lecture before the Center for International Health & Cooperation (New York: June 2003). See also Pir M. Azizi, "Special Lecture on Water Resources in Afghanistan" (Kabul, Afghanistan: 2003); Abdul Khabir Alim and Sayed Sharif Shobair, "Drought and Human Suffering in Afghanistan," Tsukuba Asian Seminar on Agricultural Education, given at the Agriculture and Forestry Research Center, University of Tsukuba (Tsukuba, Japan: 2002).

2 Azizi, "Special Lecture on Water Resources in Afghanistan."

3 International Crisis Group (ICG), "Tajikistan: A Roadmap for Development," Asia Report no. 51 (Brussels: 24 April 2003).

4 "Dam, Hydro and Irrigation Opportunities in Afghanistan," at www.export.gov (22 November 2002).

5 Alim and Shobair, "Drought and Human Suffering in Afghanistan."

6 International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), "Afghanistan: Relief Reaches Panjshir Valley Flood Victims," at www.reliefweb.net (22 July 2003).

7 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 7, 44. "Some of the worst famines," Sen wrote, "have taken place with no significant decline in food availability per head.... The importance of inter-group distributional issues rests not merely in the fact that an over-all shortage may be very unequally shared by different groups, but also in the recognition that some groups can suffer acute absolute deprivation even when there is no overall shortage." Paul Farmer has argued the same principle in terms of medicine: "disparities of risk" lead to "disparities of outcome." Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

8 The right to food is protected by article 25, section 1 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the right to "adequate and nutritious food and water" can be found in article 24, section 2 of the United Nations' Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989). Also, scholars of Hadith Islamic tradition have outlined basic protection regarding water, specifically the right of thirst (shafa), the right of irrigation (shirb), and, most well known, the right and duty of washing before prayer (wudu'). Ablution is so fundamental to the prayer tradition that most Muslim communities maintain washing facilities even in the most remote places for this purpose. Francesca De Chatel, "Drops of Faith: Water in Islam," at www.islamonline.net/English/Contemporary/2002/11/ Article02.shtml (28 November 2002).

9 Afghanistan ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) on 28 March 1994. Tajikistan ratified the CRC on 26 October 1993. See full UN documents at www.un.org/documents/ga/ docs/51/plenary/a51-424.htm.

10 Feinstein International Famine Center (FIFC), Tufts University, "Qaht-e-Pool, 'A Cash Famine'-Food Insecurity in Afghanistan, 1999-2002," at www.reliefweb.net (7 June 2002).

11 Farida Naseem and Mohammad Naseem, "The Birth of Hope: Afghanistan's Provincial Midwives Are to Be Professionally Trained in a Bid to Cut the Country's Horrifying Childbirth Mortality Rates," ARR no. 45/Institute for War & Peace Reporting, at www.reliefweb.net (24 January 2003).

12 Ibid.

13 Andreas Ruesch, "Surviving the Winter on Mulberries: Dire Need in the Afghan Mountains," Neue Zurcher Zeitung, at nzz.ch/English (11 May 2001).

14 UNICEF, Afghanistan Donor Update, at www.unicef.org (23 September, 2003).

15 Alim and Shobair, "Drought and Human Suffering in Afghanistan."

16 Famine Early Warning Systems Network, "Food Aid Needs Persist After Harvest," Afghanistan Monthly Food Security Bulletin, at www.fewsnet.org (August 2003).

17 World Food Programme (WFP), Global School Feeding Report (Rome: 2003), 15.

18 International Crisis Group (ICG), "Tajikistan: A Roadmap for Development."

19 Ibid., 9.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 18.

22 Ibid., 4.

23 Announced at the Afghanistan High Level Strategic Forum (Brussels: March 2003); Barnett R. Rubin, Humayun Hamidzada, and Abby Stoddard, "Through the Fog of Peace Building: Evaluating the Reconstruction of Afghanistan," Handbook, Center on International Cooperation, New York University (June 2003), 18.

24 Rubin, Hamidzada, and Stoddard, 9.

25 Ibid., 5.

26 I have offered an analysis of UN consolidated appeals for funding toward humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and Tajikistan in this article. Statistics were obtained from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at www.reliefweb.int/appeals/index.html.

27 Ibid.

28 Alim and Shobair, "Drought and Human Suffering in Afghanistan."

29 "Dam, Hydro and Irrigation Opportunities in Afghanistan," at www.export.gov (22 November 2002).

30 U.S. Agency for International Development, "Rebuilding Afghanistan: Progress Update for July 3 -July 9, 2003," Issue 20 (9 July 2003), 1-2.

31 Dushanbe International Fresh Water Forum, at www.freshwaterforum.org/eng/links.html (29 August-1 September 2003).

32 U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan Press Release, "USAID Irrigation Improvements Bring Water to 20,000 Hectares," (Dushanbe, Tajikistan: 20 June 2003).

33 Asian Development Bank, "Rehabilitating Irrigation and Water Resources in Poor Regions of Afghanistan," News Release no. 258/02, at www.adb.org (Manila, Philippines: 19 December 2002). "The total project cost is estimated to be US $43.75 equivalent, of which the Government will provide US $7 million and beneficiaries US $1.75 million. ADB's loan is from its concessional Asian Development Bank and carries a 32-year term, including a grace period of eight years. Interest is 1 percent per annum during the grace period and 1.5 percent per annum subsequently."

34 International Crisis Group (ICG), "Tajikistan: A Roadmap for Development." According to the International Crisis Group, Tajikistan's foreign debt will pass $1 billion in 2004. The Annual Budget in 2003 will be $212 million (637 somoni), 10 percent of what it was in 1990.

35 For details on the Rogun dam, see Asian Development Bank, "Technical Assistance to the Republic of Tajikistan for the Hydropower Development Strategy" (October 2002).

36 Statistics were obtained from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at www.reliefweb.int/appeals/index.html.

37 Integrated Regional Information Networks, "Tajikistan: Malnutrition Remains Source of Concern," at www.reliefweb.int (4 February 2004). See the original document at UN-Tajikistan, "National Nutrition and Water and Sanitation Survey 2003," at www.untj.org.

38 Aga Khan Foundation, "Aga Khan Foundation Activities in Tajikistan," at www.akdn.org (2002).

39 Ibid., 17.

40 Integrated Regional Information Networks, "Tajikistan: Malnutrition Remains Source of Concern."

41 For an excellent outline on how water and food security challenges affected Afghanistan, see Feinstein International Famine Center (FIFC), Tufts University, "Qaht-e-Pool, 'A Cash Famine'-Food Insecurity in Afghanistan, 1999-2002."

42 Ibid. The FIFC may approach an answer to the question in its recommendations on the Afghan "cash famine": "For some households there is a role for targeted, balanced and long-term programs of food assistance. However, the bulk of the vulnerable populations will find greater relief from food security through direct emergency and development interventions to create/restore primary and secondary road networks, expanded support for Cash-for-Work interventions, aggressive post-drought programs to restore livestock bases (from the family cow to the farmer's team of oxen to the pastoralists' herds); interventions to increase the quality and quantity of water available for household and agriculture use; health programs to address problems of infectious diseases, and post-drought programs to restore agriculture productivity and related employment in crops, orchards and vineyards."