Climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture is more than merely “the need for better seeds”. It needs a way to exchange information so we can re-apply proven solutions rather than re-inventing the wheel every single time….

In a wide, slow gesture, Gurbachan Singh shows me a panorama of lush fields. It is as if his hand touches the abundant, young wheat sprouts from afar. They are bright green, showing a promise of a plentiful harvest. Wide fields are bordered with tall poplar trees whose leafs softly whisper in the light wind, chasing away the early morning mist.

“All of this”, says Gurbachan, “All of this was gone. Flooded. As far as you can see. All of it. People had fled to higher grounds, but the twenty-four hours notice we had before the flood, was not sufficient to evacuate all live stock. Most buffalo and cows drowned. The harvest was lost.”

We are standing near the village of Bhoda in Punjab, North West India. From a large dike, made of sandbags, probably five metres (15 ft) high, we see the river, flowing slowly beneath us. It is hard to imagine that in July last year, this small stream had swollen with a mighty force, digging a hole in the dike, half a mile long.

“Remember the massive floods in Pakistan, around August last year?”, asks Gurbachan, “Well, we are up river from them. When the unusual strong monsoon rains, came streaming down from the mountains, it hit us a month earlier. We hardly had time to tell everyone to move. The dike burst in no time. As soon as there was a hole in the dike, water just streamed through. In a few hours, everything you see here, all the way to the horizon, was all flooded.”

And the water kept coming. With the help of an engineer, the villagers made an emergency dam with tens of thousands of sandbags. “The government promised they would rebuild the permanent dike, but we are still waiting. The sandbags were supposed to be a temporary measure. They are only filled with sand. The sun consumes the bags, so the sand leaks out of it.”

A dozen villagers have joined us, injecting comments into the discussion… There voices are loud and angry. “We get no help from the government”, they argue, “All their promises don’t mean a thing. By the next monsoon, five months from now, these sandbags will wash away. We need a proper dike, lined with stones. We should plant trees on it so the roots can hold the dike together.”

But it is not just here, in Bhoda, where the dike is fragile. All along the river for tens of miles, the river edges are low, leaving large areas prone to flooding. “Even if flooding might be stopped here, dikes anywhere else might break. And each flood will take dozens of animals with it, and destroy the crops of entire villages in a few hours time“, Gurbachan argues.

“Next year, it might even be worse”, another villager warns, “If the weather keeps on changing, and the rains continue to get heavier, maybe next year, we will not get a 24 hours notice before the flood waters hit us. Maybe the flood will be higher; maybe we will have a flood like in Pakistan, where entire provinces were wiped out. And then? Who will help us then?”.

And then something I have heard during many interviews with farmers in India: “The risk of farming has become too big”, says one of the village elders, “The cost and efforts we have to do, to earn a living, have become too high. But the worst is, we know, that we might loose our entire crop in the next flood. We know the risk is high. So every day we work on the fields, feels like it is a day of efforts in vain“, says another farmer. Others agree: “This is no future for our children.”

“You should help us”, another elder says, “You should tell our story to the people. We need proper protection against the floods. If the government can not help us, we should take matters in our own hands. So tell the story, maybe things will change. Maybe someone knows how to avoid this flooding. The weather, we can not change, but you can help us protect our crops, our lives!”

That is why I wrote the story. It shows that climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture is not only an issue of finding adapted seed varieties, teaching better irrigation methods and finding new fertilizer application techniques. Assisting farmers to cope with the challenges covers a wide area, and many aspects.

Above all, this flood story shows the need to be able to find and exchange the information. I am not an infrastructural specialist, nor a flood mitigation engineer. But I would assume that someone “out there” has worked in a flood prone area, and found a solution, other than building tens of miles of dikes, which might only move the flooding problems further downstream…

Originally posted on the CCAFS blog

One or two generations ago, smallholder farmers might have grown food crops mainly to feed their own families. But those days are gone. Farmers are looking more and more for cash income.

Like in Bihar, North-Central India: farmers still value the “yield” of a crop, but the “revenue” becomes increasingly important. It is not just because of the “Modern Times”, where electricity bills and school fees are to be paid, and people want to buy a mobile phone, a television or a tractor.
No, there is more than that: climate change has chased up the expenses: boreholes, mechanical or electric pumps, hybrid seeds… Each of these has a price ticket attached to it. A price ticket, farmers are scrambling to pay, but a necessity for any land to bare any crop.

The droughts
A good crowd had gathered in Rambad, a small village in Bihar. Both young and old, from the better-off farmers to the day labourers, all were sitting around us. We were talking about the change in weather, the effects it had on this farmers’ community and ways these people have tried to adapt over time.

When we asked who of the farmers had experimented with new things in the past years, they pointed out a slim man, probably in his late thirties, standing in a bit of a distance. As we all looked at him, he came nearer, stood up straight and held his arms stiff along his body as he said his name, “Vidyabhushan Kumar”, in a loud voice. As if a teacher had just summoned him. We asked Vidyabhushan to sit with us and tell his story.

At first, his story did not differ much from many others we heard in North India: He had a small plot of land, shared with his brothers, where they used to crop wheat and maize. In the past years, the rains have become less predictable: the monsoon comes later, and is shorter. Water has become scarce. The yearly floods bringing in new soil and moisture to the fields are a thing of the past now.

The expenses
“Nowadays, no borehole, no crops”, Vidyabhushan explained, “We need to irrigate our fields, so we have to pump water from the boreholes. But it costs money to dig a borehole. Pump sets are expensive too. They require diesel to run, and need maintenance. All of that costs money, money we need to get from what we produce. No matter what we produce, we need to look at the market value; we look at the revenue it brings.”

In the past years, Vidyabhushan started to crop vegetables after the wheat and maize harvest. “I can get several crops of vegetables before I need to sow wheat again”, he said, “but still that is not enough to provide an income for my family. I needed more.”

Teak, a new source of income.
He took us to the flat roof of his house. In a corner about one hundred small seedlings stood together.

“Teak”, he said, “These are teak seedlings. You see, I calculated: I can buy these at 76 rupees a piece (about US$ 2). The tree needs 10 years to mature, and its timber will bring me 30,000 to 40,000 rupees (US$750 to US$1,000) for each tree. If I plant teak trees on the border of my field, about 6 feet apart, I can plant one hundred teak trees. This will give me a cash revenue of about 300,000 rupees (US$7,500) per year.”

“There is a big teak market abroad, so the resale value is almost guaranteed.” Vidyabhushan smiled, “ But my risks are low. Teak trees don’t need a lot of water, and they don’t conflict with my other crops. The trees can just grow on the edge of my fields. These trees will bring me the cash I need, both for my family, and to counter the increased expenses I have with my other crops. ”

The future: cash or food?
He kneeled down to pick up one of the seedlings. I noticed how careful and softly he handles the tiny plant as he shows it to me. It was as if he was holding his future in his hands.

When we thanked him for the interview, he said “No, don’t go yet, I still want to show you my field, and my crops.” Vidyabhushan smiled as he walked through his vegetable patch: “You see, we can’t eat timber, we can’t eat money. No matter how the market would change, no matter of the revenue teak would bring me, I still need to feed my family. And for that I need to grow food, not just timber!”

But maybe, he is the last generation to still think so. Maybe, as the climate changes, erratic rains, droughts and pests might push farmers’ expenses even higher. Would the next generation of farmers then think of “Revenue only”-crops? What would happen then if they’d stop growing food crops? What would happen if smallholder farmers would switch to non-food crops on a large scale?

Read the original post on the CCAFS blog

When discussing climate change, we often discuss about the technical part of “agriculture”: crop varieties, irrigation or farming methods. But climate change also has a profound social impact within the rural communities, which rely mostly on agriculture. Climate change will push many smallholder farmers over “the edge”, back into poverty.

Arti Devi from Rambad in Bihar, India, is one of them.

Arti is married and has three children, two girls and a boy. Up to some years ago, she owned a small plot of land where she cultivated wheat and some vegetables, and had two buffaloes. This was sufficient to provide food and an income to her family.

“As the weather changed, we had less rain in this region. The yearly floods which used to bring in new fertile soil to my fields, just stopped. So my field yielded less and less.”, Arti explains, “As the lands dried up, it also became more difficult to find fodder for the buffaloes”.

To make matters worse, a few years ago, her husband had an accident. It disabled him from working on the fields so now he works as labourer in the city. He earns 1,000 rupees (about US$25) per month. Half of it, he sends home to Arti.

“We had no savings to cover my husband’s initial medical expenses”, she whispers, “So, we first had to mortgage our land, and later on, we had to sell the buffaloes. Now, I am left with no land, and no animals. I have to work as day labourer on other people’s fields. That’s my income now.”

For six hours of work on the fields, she gets about 20 rupees (about US$0.5) and 2-3 kgs of vegetables. “But with this changing weather, things got even worse”, Arti says, “I used to be able to work about three weeks per month, and six month per year. But now, the fields yield less. Some fields are left fallow during summer as there is not enough water in the boreholes. So there is less work for us, day labourers. Now, we can only work maybe fifteen days per month, and four months per year.”

“The only option I had was to take my oldest daughter from school. She now works as a day labourer also. Once my youngest daughter will be a bit older, she will help me on the fields also. I will try to keep my son in school, so he can get a decent job later. But I am not sure if I will manage. We hardly manage to buy our food.”

And that is where the cycle starts back at the beginning.

The original post was published on the CCAFS blog

“Germplasm collection”, “allele diversity”, “Crop registers”, might sound like mystic academic terms to you. Likewise for me, I could hardly link them into the discussion about climate change and food security…. Until I visited the genebank on the ICRISAT campus near Hyderabad in India.

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a non-profit organization conducting agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. ICRISAT is part of a consortium of similar agricultural research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
…and they have a bank. Not to store money or gold, but to safeguard something much more precious: the genetic material – or “germplasm”- of 119,000 “accessions” -or varieties- of sorghum, pearl millet and six other types of small millets, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut, collected from 144 countries.

“Genetic diversity is key to the future”
Over thousands of years, different food crops have evolved into zillions of different varieties, either grown as a cultivated crop, or flourishing in the wild. Each variety differs from the next in the way it naturally adapted its genetic code to the environment it grows in: how it deals with drought or a high soil salinity, how it built up resistance to certain pests. Many differ in their yield, size, leaves or roots.

But, as Bob Dylan sung: “Times are a-changing”. Farmers now often concentrate on monocultures, or grow only a selection of high yielding crops. Commercial companies have been “successful” in promoting certain varieties, which farmers adopted quickly, and –thanks to globalization- were spread widely. Understandably so, as “the world needs to produce more food”. However, all of this became nefast for the bio-diversity: Today, the rate in which traditional seed varieties disappear, is higher than ever.
This stands in stark contrast with the demand for more and specialized seed varieties, adapted to the ever changing weather patterns. If the genetic biodiversity disappears, where will we find the seed varieties helping farmers to cope with future environmental changes?

Unless if we safeguard our existing seed varieties for the wide range of crops the world grows, we will no longer have the genetic material to re-generate seeds adapted to the future climate changes.

And that is where genebanks come in. Genebanks like the one I was standing in this morning, at ICRISAT.

ICRISAT’s genebank: saving our past, for our future.

In two large earthquake proof and environment controlled “vaults”, ICRISAT’s genebank is safeguarding the bioversity of sorghum, millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut. These crops might not be staple food such as wheat, maize or rice, but they are just as essential to a balance diet of the world’s ever growing population, particularly for the poorest of the poor in the semi-arid tropics.

It is a common misunderstanding that malnutrition is only caused by the lack of SUFFICIENT food to eat. More often than not, malnutrition is caused by a lack of THE RIGHT food, containing all nutrients, like proteins and vitamins which make a balanced diet.

Take the case of chickpeas: did you know that chickpeas make up for more than 20 percent of world pulse production? Did you know that chickpeas contain 25% proteins, the maximum provided by any pulse? While in the developed world, the protein intake comes mostly from fish or meat, in the majority of the developing countries this is not the case: Fish or meat is a luxury commodity, and people have to resort to pulses like chickpeas for their daily protein intake. That makes chickpeas an important crop in the global fight against hunger.

To safeguard the variety of commodities like chickpeas, allowing researchers to re-create old varieties or generate new varieties, adapted to the ever changing climate, the genetic material needs to be saved. And that is the role of a genebank.

Over the past thirty years, the ICRISAT genebank collected and stored over 20,000 different varieties of chickpeas, collected from 60 countries, making it the largest of its kind in the world. And not only for chickpeas, but for the more than 119,000 varieties of the 11 crop types it caters for.

The genebank collects and stores seeds

Sube Singh, a lead scientific officer, who has worked in ICRISAT’s genebank since 1978, explains: “The collection, selection and storage of the genetic material of our seeds is an elaborate process. It is not just a matter of taking just “any” seed, and storing it in a bag.
We get seed material, sometimes as little as 100 seeds in a single sample. First we verify the characteristics of that particular variety: its origin, the growing period, the yield, resistance to pests or drought, and hundreds of other characteristics which make the genetic difference between the varieties. If we find we don’t have this variety yet, the seed sample goes into a quarantine area where we ensure the seed is free of any contamination or pest, as this could affect all other seeds we store or cultivate. After it is certified to be safe, we can process it further.”

“But the work does not stop there”, Mr Sing continues:  “An extensive biochemical analysis gives us further details on the seed sample’s characteristics, which are all stored in a central database. For some seeds, we need to regenerate it: if we only have a limited quantity, we reproduce new seeds from the sample we received, either in quarantined greenhouses or on our test fields.”

After a drying process, seeds are then stored into the “active collection”, an isolated vault storing the seeds in bottles, at +4 ^o C, where they can be kept for 25 to 30 years. Each seed variety is checked every five years to see if its capacity to reproduce is not degrading. The second vault, the “base collection”, stores seeds at -20 ^o C, where they can be kept for 100 years.

But the strength of a genebank is not in storing alone.

When I ask Sube what the real value of genebank is, his eyes light up…: “The more seeds which are re-used, the better. That is our real success factor”. He gave the example of Iraq and Afghanistan where the war wiped out those two countries’ genebank. There was no way to find the “core” seeds of the local food stocks anymore. This would have been catastrophic for the agriculture and the population as a whole, if it was not for the ICRISAT genebank: Local varieties of these crops were stored at the bank before the war. Samples were “repatriated” to both countries so the seeds could be regenerated, and distributed “en masse” to the farmers.

But it is not only Iraq and Iran. In the past thirty odd years, the ICRISAT genebank has distributed 1.4 million samples to 143 countries. Some of these varieties would have been lost for ever, if it wasn’t for the ICRISAT genebank.

Creating a future, thanks to the past.

Doomsday-like scenarios where countries loose their genetic material might be one –rather negative- example showing the importance of genebanks. A much more common use of biodiverse genetic material, is to generate new varieties, adapted to newly emerging needs.

Taking the example of chickpeas again, research showed that several accessions (or varieties) from a mini-core collection at the genebank were more drought resistant than the common “ICC4958” variety, widely used in semi-arid areas. Using the ICRISAT seed collection, new and better varieties were created and distributed.

“Drought resistance” is just one of the many qualifiers. Imagine what the impact is when one wants to create new varieties adapted to warmer or colder climates, resistant to pests, or to salinity…

“Salinity is a good example”, says Sube. “The 2004 tsunami contaminated millions of hectares of agricultural land with sea water. All of sudden, farmers found that their traditional seeds could no longer grow in this saltier environment. Through the genebank, we generated varieties which were adapted to their changed environment: varieties with a higher salinity resistance.”

As Sube was explaining me the mechanics and process of the selection and storage, the image of a coin collector came to my mind. I asked him: “An antique coin collector often has one piece he is particularly proud of, do you have one seed variety or one specific ‘find’, which you cherish like gold?”.

Sube smiled: “New varieties are created every day. One hundred year old samples, or a variety cultivated last year, for us, all have the same value, all are equally precious. For us, every seed sample is like gold”.

Read the original post on the CCAFS blog.

During my past visits to Kenya, Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, one common streak always came up when talking to farmers about climate adaptation techniques: they were all actively using new seed varieties for their different crops.

I had not really questioned where those seed varieties came from. I saw them in the shops of commercial seed traders, so I asked no more. A bit like a child does not ask where Santa comes from. A long and complex process of seed selection and breeding remained hidden for me.

A visit to ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics near Hyderabad in India, changed all of that. I discovered the world’s headquarter for the agriculture research on five crops: sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut. And I discovered the link between chickpeas, chickpea heroes and the war against hunger.

Food diets, malnutrition and chickpeas
Sufficient food, but also a balanced food intake are key to battle malnutrition. Often the world’s attention goes to staple foods like rice, maize or wheat. We often forget it takes other crops too, to make a balanced diet, in a global fight against hunger.

Chickpeas is one of those crops, and an important one, as they make up for more than 20 percent of the world pulse production. Chickpeas contain 22-25% proteins, and 2-3 times more iron and zinc than wheat. Chickpea protein quality is better than other pulses. …

So understandably, agricultural researchers, like Dr. Pooran M.Gaur, a principal scientist and chickpea breeder at ICRISAT, make continuous efforts to develop new chickpea varieties, adapted to fast changing environmental conditions. “Super Chickpeas”, as it were. Bred by –what I would not hesitate to call – “super scientists”, in the quiet isolation of agricultural research centers.

Agricultural research in service of food security
I meet Pooran amidst the ICRISAT chickpea test fields in Patancheru, near Hyderabad in India. He tells me a story which illustrates the importance, and profound impact agricultural research can have on food production, and food security: “In India, for hundreds of years, chickpeas have been grown in the relatively colder Northern areas during the dry winter season where they flourish in temperatures of 20 to 30 dgr C. The traditional chickpea varieties were not really suitable for the climate here in Andhra Pradesh for instance. They were late maturing and required longer duration (more than 120 days) to grow. That stretched the crop to grow into the hot season and moisture stress conditions. Ten years ago, only 160,000 hectares of chickpeas were grown in this state. The yield was only about 600 kgs/hectare.”

But things changed in recent years. Using a combination of different chickpea seed varieties which had a shorter growing season, and which were more resistant to higher temperatures, agricultural researchers like Pooran were able to breed varieties which needed only 90 to 95 days to mature.

“We distributed samples of these new varieties to universities and government institutes who tested them, and were impressed about the results. One particular variety, released as “JG11”, has thoroughly impacted the production of chickpeas in India, especially in the South.”

JG11 was rapidly adopted by many farmers in central and southern India. “Here in Andhra Pradesh, in just a few years, the total surface of chickpea cultivation increased to 630,000 hectares, a fourfold from before. But even more importantly, the average yield increased from 600 to 1,400 kgs/hectare, almost three times as much.”, Pooran explains.

Knowing how important chickpeas are in the typical Indian diet, one can say the impact of the new variety’s ninefold production increase had a profound impact.

But it is not the end of the road for chickpeas
As the “Super Chickpea” early varieties – like JG11 – are now widely used in India, and different parts of Asia and Africa, ICRISAT concentrates on other new varieties to help farmers adapt to the ever changing climate and environmental conditions.

“We use various parameters to select our breeding materials”, Pooran stresses. “We are developing varieties which are early maturing and high yielding, tolerant to drought and heat stresses, resistant to deceases and insect infestation, and have good seed quality”

ICRISAT supplies improved breeding lines to universities and government research institutes, who select the best lines, and release these as varieties. Further down the seed chain, the research institutes produce “breeder seed” which is used by the public and private seed sectors to produce “foundation seeds” and then “certified seeds”, which are sold to the farmers.
Up to now, ICRISAT -bred chickpea materials have led to the release of 73 new varieties in 10 countries.

Working for impact.
I ask Pooran if after 25 years working as a chickpea breeder, he ever thought of moving to another crop? “No way”, he answers, “chickpeas are ‘it’ for me. The world produces about 9 million tons of chickpeas per year, in 50 countries. These are not only used for their own production, but also as a cash crop, as over 140 countries import chickpeas. So the demand is high. For the poor in the world, combined with a staple food of rice, maize, sorghum, millet or any wheat, chickpeas make a perfect diet. It contains a lot of protein and is rich in minerals, amino acids and several vitamins.”

“But there is more to it: Chickpea is a hardy crop and can be grown in marginal lands on residual moisture, where the high-input crops fail to give economic returns. It is able to take much of its nitrogen requirement from the atmosphere by forming a symbiotic association with soil bacteria called rhizobium, and thus does not need much fertilizer.”

So when asked what his dream is, Pooran answers: “I would like to increase the global awareness of the qualities of chickpeas. Here at ICRISAT, we have already directly contributed to new varieties now used in semi-arid areas in several countries, including Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, which are prone to hunger and malnutrition. But we can spread it further. We also need to emphasize to farmers that chickpeas are not just a low input or a diversity crop: with the new varieties we are breeding now, farmers should be able to select those varieties adapted to their fields, and the changing weather. They need to be taught proper crop production technologies, so their yields can further increase”.

“Mr Super Chickpea”, is clearly a man with a mission. And he is not alone in the battle against hunger. Every day, dozens of researchers at ICRISAT, and thousands like them in similar research institutes join in his cause, helping farmers around the globe to adapt to climate change.

We can rightfully call them, “the silent heroes in the war against hunger”.

The original article was published on the CCAFS blog

Dubai International Airport – October 7, 2001.
I step out of the plane and look at my watch. 10 pm. Two hours to shop in the Dubai Tax Free before boarding my connecting flight to Islamabad, Pakistan.
I follow the stream of arriving passengers moving along on the first floor of the airport, overlooking the shopping area. I look at the vast crowd below. A dense mix of every possible nationality, religion and ethnicity in the world, expressed through a myriad of dress codes. From formal western suites, the traditional Arab dishdashahs, women in mini skirts mixed with those fully veiled. Rough Afghani chupans, expensive Indian silk sari’s, Berber djellabas, Australian safari shorts, Sudanese turbans, American baseball caps and Arab hijabs. This crowd seems to represent the world within one space. But the crowd is not strolling along from one shop to another in its usual way. The people are talking in groups, some with raised voices and expressive hand gestures, and others whisper. There is no laughing, nor joy but a nervousness makes the tension in the air so thick one could cut it with a knife. You do not have to be a clairvoyant to feel something is wrong.

Hundreds of people are lining up at the transit counters, below large displays listing numerous cancelled and delayed flights. The atmosphere is grim. Utter grim. I grab hold of someone in an Emirates Airlines uniform and ask her what is going on. She answers: “Have you not heard? The US started bombing Afghanistan a few hours ago. They closed the airspace above Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and all Gulf countries. No civil plane will be flying anymore for a while!”.
For a moment, I feel like the ground is pulled away from beneath my feet. “The US started bombing Afghanistan… This, we have feared since 9/11, a month ago. Retaliation. The beginning of the turmoil in the region, which will last for years. What will happen with Pakistan? How will the government react, how will the people react?”, thoughts flash through my mind as the lady explains the airline has booked hotel rooms, and buses are waiting outside.

I act like a robot: I walk through immigration, pick up my bags, and walk outside. The heat, humidity and mere mass of people crowded at the airport exit cuts off my breath. I get onto the bus and let myself fall into a free seat. I look at the crowd, the stuck traffic,…
- “Not flying tonight, are you?”, a voice says. I wake up from my reverie and look at the guy next to me. American accent.
- “No, apparently not!”, I mumble.
- “Harry”, he says as he holds out his hand.
- “Peter”, I answer, “where were you supposed to fly to?”
- “Oh, I was supposed to fly to Uganda”, he says, “my wife works there.”
- “Oh, really”, I answer, “I worked there too, left two years ago”. I try to make conversation, killing the time waiting for the bus to leave..
- “Really? You work for the UN?”
- “Yes, I do, for WFP”.
- “Oh, my wife works in the same building.. Cathy Ashcroft, maybe you know her!”. It turns out Harry is the husband of Cathy I know since years, the same Cathy I helped setting up the OCHA office in Kampala. We engage into a vivid conversation of Kampala, life in Africa, relief work and of course come back to the subject of the US bombing campaign.

After checking into the hotel, Harry and I walk to the night club, the only place we can still get a drink. In the mean time, it is already 1 am. A few men and a couple form the meagre audience, spread over a dozen tables. A small live band is playing without much enthusiasm. We take a seat in the back, and order a drink. I really really need a drink.
I tell Harry about how we feared for the retaliation, how we feared how the whole region was going to react. No matter how much everyone hated the Taliban, it was still an attack on a sovereign country. A Muslim country. Would countries in the region now choose sides? Be forced to choose sides? Above all, it would mean that masses of people would be killed. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands would start moving within the country, trying to find refuge. It could possibly cause an exodus into all countries around Afghanistan: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran,… Working for a front-line humanitarian organisation, I know what this would mean for us: we would go and provide aid, close to the line of fire. I think of all our national staff who is still in Afghanistan.
All of a sudden the band changes beat and a belly dancer starts her act. There is something wrong with this picture… A war has started tonight. A big one. And here we are in a dark bar, watching a belly dancer…

I find no joy, pay for the drinks, say good-bye to Harry, and walk outside. Sitting on a bench near the hotel entrance, I lit a cigarette. I close my eyes, and imagine the infernos of fire, explosions, shrapnel in the black night around Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar. All places I have visited in Afghanistan. I can see families trying to seek refuge in their homes. I can see their fear not knowing what is going on, how long it would last, and what this would mean for them, and their livelihood. I can smell their fear even where I was sitting.
I look up. The night sky is clear. I imagine the Tomahawks launched from war ships close by. I imagine war planes rushing overhead, ten miles up in the sky. The pilots looking down at Dubai, this city of light and splendour, as they bank left and turn the direction of Afghanistan.

Postscript.
I was blocked in Dubai for three days. Spent the whole time in my hotel room, on email and telephone, coordinating with my team in Islamabad and with my counter parts in Rome. After three days, the air space was re-opened. I got onto the first plane that flew from Dubai to Islamabad. People were so anxious to get back home, they started a fight while boarding.
One month later, I landed in Kabul. As the Taliban retreated, they suffered quite some losses. People took the turbans from the bodies and threw them up in the trees. The turbans unruffled and for months long strips of shiny turban cloth were weaved in between the branches, floating in the wind.

It made me think of the start of the war and the belly dancer. The same contrast I found in dead bodies and their turbans floating in the wind, dangling from a tree. There is nothing poetic about the horrors of war. I understood what Marlon Brando meant in “Apocalypse Now”.

Pictures courtesy theme.cc (bombing), CNN (Tomahawk), umami.co.nz (Duty free zone)

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Kabul. The Afghans pronounce it with a long, closed ‘o’, making it sound like ‘Ko-obel’. Most of the a’s are pronounced like an ‘o’ here. Ko-obel. Kabul. It is afternoon. The late-summer sun descends low over the horizon, giving the yellow scenery a golden glow with long exotic shadows. During this time of the year, the temperatures are nice. Really enjoyable. In between the battering dry heat of summer and the biting cold of the long winters, are those short periods which tourist brochures would define as a ‘moderate Mediterranean climate’. The tourist brochures for Kabul must date back to the fifties and sixties most likely.

We are sitting on the stairs of Kabul airport, facing the tarmac looking over the airstrip. Kabul International Airport. There are a bunch of us, all relief workers and reporters. Two from a Pakistani camera crew for the Deutsche Welle, a tall blond Danish demining expert, an Australian water drilling expert from Unicef, a Bangladeshi seed expert from FAO and myself. We are waiting for the UN plane to pick us up. And the plane pretty much has its own time schedule, defined by the “Chaos Theory” dominating Taliban air clearances, weather patterns and the number of people getting stuck at immigration each time the plane lands.

Immigration. The Immigration Counter… All speaks straight to the core of one’s imagination. The airport is heavily damaged. Probably already since twenty or thirty years. Traces of shrapnel and grenade explosions. Bullet holes in windows and walls. Some of them nicely lined up as maybe one of the last Russian soldiers emptied his AK47 while sinking through his knees, shot in the back of his head, spraying the bullets in a nearly perfect curve over the wall. War graffiti. As if saying ‘Alexander was here’, and ‘Alexander was here and never left’. ‘Sacha’ for his friends. ‘Alexej’ for his wife, who will never see him alive again. ‘Alexander was here’, 20 odd bullet holes in a row. The last ones disappeared in the ceiling, where most of the off-white square cardboard tiles have gone and one can see the building skeleton through the aluminum frames of the false ceiling. Cables run left and right in metallic gutters, now rendered useless as it has been many years since Kabul International Airport had its last spark of electricity.

That is probably why everything is so quiet. It calls for religious silence. Respectful silence. Or are sounds just absorbed in the vast empty space which is now left of the airport? It seems people do speak more softly, move more discretely through the different parts of the airport which are now nothing more but ‘remains’. The remains of the rubber belt which once delivered luggage. Torn up, cuddled up in a corner. Remains of counters, half removed, half torn apart. The most inspiring I found the remains of the mechanical displays above the check in counters, and the large display in the entrance hall. You know the kind which click-clack showing the flights, one small metal plate for each letter. What was the last regular flight which left Kabul International Airport? The flight 1203 at 10:15 to Tblisi, it says in Cyrillic on check-in counter 5. I am sure it is counter 5, but the display is dismantled, and two wires stick out of the metallic tube. Wonder if it was shot off or someone just took it with him. Maybe one of the last Russians leaving here has it on display in his living room in St.Petersburg or Kiev, as a war trophy: a plastic yellow square with the black number ‘5’ on it. Would any of his friends believe this was the ‘5’ of the Kabul check-in counter ‘5’, leaving for Tblisi at 10:15 somewhere in a dark past?

Through the entrance hall windows, you gaze onto the main space in front of the airport, filled with rubble. Stones, sprouts of yellow-dry grass. A shot-down primitive watch tower made hastily of metal rusty frames, probably once was the seat of the referee at the tennis club at the Kabul Intercontinental. In the corner, on top of a pickup truck, a guy leisurely rests his arm over a heavy machine gun, bolted onto the roof of the car. Some low scrubs of trees survived the third year of drought, and decades during which people had other priorities than the esthetics of the vegetation at the airport entrance.

Some Taliban officials sit outside the door of ‘Gate 2’, through which we came. One of them, I recognize. He has a turban with Scottish tartan squares, and a sleeveless vest over his long traditional coat and pants. He has the most amazing friendly blue eyes. Many Afghans have. Or green. Many have a light skin and ‘European’ features. My guy talks German, I remember. ‘Der UN Pilot has kein Uhr’, he smiles at me pointing at the sky. ‘The UN pilot does not have a watch’. He is a hydraulic engineer, and studied in East Germany many years ago. He traveled around a fair bit of the world, and right now, he is a ‘Taliban’, watching over the immigration procedures at Kabul International Airport. He cracks some jokes with the custom officials while putting his thumbs in the small watch pockets of his sleeveless jacket, once a part of a stylish Western suit.

He shouts a few words at the two Taliban guards, who are laying on their side on an iron bed frame on the side of the stairs, a bit further up. They are young men in their late teens or early twenties. In deep brown traditional clothes, with a dark gray-brown turban. All their turbans have one long end hanging down from the back over their shoulder up to their waist. Rather attractive. I honestly bet you it will come up one year in the ‘haute couture’ shows of a fashion designer in Paris. Their AK47’s loosely lean against their shoulders. – of the Taliban soldiers that is, not of the Paris models. -. Many of these guys live, eat and sleep with their gun. It looks like it is part of their dressing code, almost part of their body. Most of them actually grew up with their gun, to help protecting their tribe, their herd, their family, and now their nation. The gun is worn out, no more varnish on the wood pieces. The dark spray paint on the metal parts, is rubbed off by the constant handling. But like an old car, it is probably a reliable piece of machinery.

Golden yellow, golden brown, like a picture on a postcard. Remains of summer, a beautiful early fall evening. The mountain range around Kabul is dry. Not a single tree, just some yellow bushes. ‘Amazing’, says the demining expert. I agree. While sitting on the stairs right at the apron, we have a 180 degree sight of the landing strip, taxi runways and hangers around the airport. With the dry yellow mountains, under the fading yellow sun, with small yellow dust devils whirling up small yellow tubes of sand and dust here and there, in between the wrecks of literally hundreds machines of war. Shot down, missed the runway, blown up, or just dumped and stripped of spare parts. MIL-8 Russian helicopter gunships with big dark ragged edged holes in their light yellow and green camouflaged side. Pieces of old artillery and tipped over radar equipment. Antonov and Ilhutsin cargo planes sticking their tail or wing in the air. Hangers with caved-in roofs, with crashed fuel and supply trucks underneath their vast concrete weight.
Three Boeing 727’s from Ariana, the official Afghan national airline, have their cockpit windows covered with a large cotton sheet, and their engines are closed off with red orange shutters. These are the last remains of the Afghanistan national fleet. They still fly within the country, but maintenance and spare parts becomes a pain. The sanctions do not allow the import of plane parts, nor do they allow international commercial flights. A few times per year, one international Ariana flight is allowed to transport children for treatment in Frankfurt, if I remember well. I met the German orthopedic surgeon who accompanies the children on these trips. Was it Frankfurt or Munich? A long flight, he said. And adventurous! But a good opportunity to have maintenance done on the plane while on the ground in Germany.

This is a magical moment. Italian opera music with a full mezzo-soprano voice plays in my head. ‘In Pace’ by Sarah Brightman. Try it, and then picture this scene from what will once have to be part of a movie: ‘In Pace’, ‘In Peace’ playing with nothing but the soft wind on the background, the camera makes a slow, very slow panoramic 180 dgrs pan. A gracious gesture of cinematographic perfection, starting at the left from the hangers and the few MIG fighters left intact, over the yellow specks of grass in between the runways, slowly over dumped or crashed Russian trucks, helicopters, planes sticking out of the low scrub bushes like a mechanical war grave yard, all covered with the yellow dust. The camera moves over the tarmac and in between the soprano voice, the microphone picks up the very remote and soft roar of the white Beechcraft UN aircraft approaching. The camera pans slowly over the old Ariana Boeing 727, with the edge of the cotton window cover sheet softly waving in the wind. The camera slowly slowly zooms out to show the emptiness of the apron, the voidness of the airport, the absolute acknowledgement of existence and persistence in this war torn airport, in this war torn capital city of this warn torn country, which is the center of a war torn region, terrorized by draught and the playing field of the big international powers-that-be.

The camera zooms out, and from the left of the screen, one can hear a noise. Weet-..-weet. Very softly but sharply. Weet-..-weet. A repetitive metal squeak. Slowly. And as the camera continues to zoom out, a Taliban with his Khalashnikov over his shoulder, on an old Chinese bicycle rides into the left of the picture. Weet..-..weet. He has a bundle of hay on the back of his bicycle as he slowly cycles off the runway, over the apron, between the parked MIGs, the Ariana planes, and the taxi-ing UN plane. And at his own pace, the cyclist moves out of the picture, but the sound, you can still hear for a while. Weet-..-weet-..-weet. The plane neutrals the pitch of its propeller blades and shuts off the engine. (I always found that an appealing noise) ffffff-rrrrr-wwaaaaaaattt.. And before we know it, the plane has integrated into the yellow scenery, of a perfect afternoon in Kabul. The soprano voice fades out, and so does the picture. In Pace. In Peace…

Exactly one week later, at almost exactly the same time of day in Kabul, the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

Top picture courtesy of Carl De Keyzer , Taliban picture courtesy of Hashmat Moslih

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They did not think it was funny.

More stories on this site related to Afghanistan, you find here.

Wild Cannabis
You needed to pass a security checkpoint next to the building before being allowed to drive onto the parking lot. This caused a bit of traffic jam in the morning, when everyone was coming to work. Next to the checkpoint was a piece of bare land, with different billboards from the UN agencies and NGOs based in ‘The Tower’. Sometimes the weeds on the bare field were growing that high, they would almost cover the view of the billboards. As I was sitting in the car, queuing up one morning, I thought at first, I was mistaken. But no, the wild cannabis was growing that high, it almost covered up the UN Drug Control Program’s billboard. I thought it was quite symbolic. How to control the drugs in a country where hash grew in the wild, uncontrolled.

The Orange Bearded Guards
After the car check entering the parking, you had to pass through another security check at the entrance, where the local guards body searched you. They were a friendly bunch. Most of them old ex-army guys. Many were hiding their grey hair by washing it with henna, which turned their hair and long beard bright orange/red. I mean *real* bright. A European punk-age kinda red. It was funny to see sometimes.. They hardly spoke any English and always had a real apologetic smile on their face when they body searched us, the foreigners… As if to say ‘Really sorry, but my boss told me to do so’. The check was always more for the show than anything else. Certainly for me, as I always wore my safari jacket, filled with goodies that would set off their handheld metal detector. When something beeped, they pointed at it to ask what I had in my jacket there. I always said what it was, but most of the time, their English was so poor, they did not understand it anyway. They just nodded and smiled… And we all played along in the daily security slapstick.

Oh Baby!
Saudi Pak was a tall square building. The offices ran along the outer wall, creating a huge open space, stretching all the way vertically in the centre of the building. This helped the air circulation, and gave a special flair to the building. It also create quite a bit of noise, though, as any sound would travel many floors up and down. One night, I was working really late, and forgot all about the ‘mega amplifier’ effect from the central hallway as I was sucked into processing the backlog of hundreds of Emails. I had left the door leading into the centre hall open, just to get a bit of fresh air in. I played my music real loud, with a good sub-woofer bass. Little did I realize how the music must have echo-ed all through the building. Soon enough all guards from the ground floor had come up to my office to stick their head through the door, checking what the racket was all about. None of them spoke English, so I put my thumb up with a question mark on my face, and they nodded, thumbs up. It was OK. It was more than OK. To show me they really liked it, they started swinging slowly, and mumbling along with the tune… It was a lovely picture: half a dozen elderly guards, all with their henna-dyed bright red-orange hair and beard, in uniform, standing shoulder to shoulder, with their AK47 machine guns in their hands, swinging slowly side to side, as if listening to divine music, on the slow tunes of “Let’s make love tonight” by Faith Hill:

Let’s make love,
all night long !
Until all our strength is gone!
Hold on tight,
just let go!
I want to feel you in my soul
Until the sun comes up…
Let’s make love !
Oh, baby, baby

Yep, oh, baby, baby!
I guess this was the living proof that music sooths all spirits. Guess the US should try that with the Taliban..

Picture courtesy cannabisculture.com (cannabis plant), Zootstar (bearded man)

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Just as 9/11 happened, we were giving a training for our Afghan staff here in Islamabad. Last night, we took some out for dinner. We picked them up from their hotel, and took them as a treat to one of the fanciest restaurant in town, in the Marriott hotel. As we drove up through the entrance of the Marriott parking lot, there was actually a traffic jam of the small local taxis, each with a huge satellite dish strapped onto their roof rack. Stickers on them for the big news networks. CNN, BBC, Sky, AFP, Fox, Al Jazeera, ITN, ITV, RAI… The hotel’s roof was engulfed in bright floodlights as the anchor speakers were ‘Reporting Live From Islamabad’, with the city lights in the background..

No more denial that our lives were going to take a sharp turn for the worse.. We were going to be in the midst of all the action… And the reactions of the people in the meeting was taking a twist today: from denial to a slight state of panic. The tone of the meeting is definitively much more nervous than the previous days.

Yawn…
My thoughts are running off. I am thinking of the Afghan staff at dinner last night. They were worried about their families left back home in Mazar, Kabul, Faizabad, Jalalabad… Would the Taliban go nuts, and start murdering and plundering? Or empose an ever stricter regime? They wondered how each of them was going to get back home, as we evacuated all international staff from Afghanistan the day after 9/11. We also suspended the UN flights from Islamabad into Afghanistan…

Somewhere, a change of tone in the conversation draws my attention. A lady from one of the agencies starts talking in a low voice. I concentrate again.
She is leaning forward and whispers slowly:

I stand up, cough, raise my hand. The lady stops talking and looks at me as if she sees a ghost. She starts pointing her trembling finger at me. She does not say anything.. Just points at me and after a few seconds, starts blushing.

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