The 2008 Joint Meeting of the Society for Range Management and the America Forage and Grassland Council.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008
47

Watershed Restoration in Afghanistan

Habib Hemat1, Mahmood Biparwa1, Jack Alexander III2, Kamal Bahttacharyya1, Paul Hicks1, and Wolfgang Pittroff3. (1) Afghanistan Program, Catholic Relief Services, Harat, Iraq, (2) Synergy Resource Solutions, Inc., 5393 Hamm Rd, Belgrade, MT 59714, (3) Livestock Systems Research, Wingertstr. 3, Idar-Oberstein, Germany

Rangeland-based livestock production is the backbone of agriculture in Afghanistan. Close proximity of Afghanistan to one of the major domestication centers of ruminants suggests exposure to livestock grazing for thousands of years of these semi-arid and arid rangelands. Increasing population pressure and decades of war have seriously destabilized communal grazing regimes and caused extreme levels of overuse of these fragile rangeland systems. The rural population does not only depend on rangeland-based livestock production for their livelihoods; the ecological integrity of rangelands is also basic to the water economy of this country where practically all usable precipitation falls in the winter as snow. Therefore, restoration of degraded watersheds has become one of the most important tasks in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. In 2006, Catholic Relief Services, funded by World Bank and other donors, initiated a regional watershed rehabilitation project in Herat and Ghor provinces in western Afghanistan.  This paper summarizes the design of a community-based rangeland restoration program encompassing rangeland inventory, monitoring, restoration, livestock development and the development of sustainable agreements for communal management of rangeland resources. Initial surveys demonstrate the extreme extent of rangeland degradation and the urgency of restoration efforts. The interaction of socio-economic and ecological factors in restoration and sustainable management of communal resources is discussed.

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