It was following the fall of the Taliban regime that people began to encroach upon the deserts of south west Afghanistan and claim it as their own. After an initial investment in shallow wells that ran dry, increasing numbers of settlers began to use percussion drills to sink wells into the ground up to 130 metres in depth. Then, with affordable diesel generators and waterpumps imported from Pakistan and China these farmers transformed what was once rocky desert soil into productive agricultural land.
Topic:
Agriculture, Water, Rural, and Land
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Middle East, and Asia
Oxfam analysis finds that governments and donors are failing to provide women farmers with relevant and adequate support for farming and adapting to climate change. Oxfam conducted research on government and donor investments in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania. It found that funding in these countries is significantly lower than commitments that have been made, and there is little evidence of resources and technical assistance reaching women farmers. Resources are being diverted to priorities other than smallholder farmers, and for the most part governments lack the capacity to deliver funding to them. This paper presents the findings along with recommendations for governments.
Topic:
Agriculture, Climate Change, Gender Issues, Women, and Farming
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Africa, Middle East, Philippines, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana
In the aftermath of the 2010–11 floods, the path to recovery and reconstruction in Pakistan will be long and full of challenges. However, there is also an opportunity to tackle crucial structural issues such as crippling inequalities in people's rights and access to land. A failure to do so would not only condemn millions of Pakistanis to continued and deepening poverty, it would also undermine the scope and sustainability of the country's recovery from this disaster and its ability to cope with the next.
Topic:
Agriculture, Political Economy, Poverty, and Natural Disasters
Pakistan faces a multidimensional water crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The root causes of the crisis are twofold: circumstantial, which are linked to poor water-resource management policies (including water-wasting flood irrigation) structural, tied to factors deeply ingrained in politics and society such as the obsession with India, inequitable rural land-ownership and endemic water misgovernance (for example, exploitation of the rotational irrigation system to the detriment of the poor). To resolve the crisis, both types of cause will need to be tackled, and the international community can play an invaluable role.