A new $10 million contract has been awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to the California-based Roots of Peace organization and a consortium of partners, including UC Davis, to fund restoration of grape and raisin vineyards in areas of Afghanistan once riddled with land mines.
The contract includes $6 million in federal funds and $4 million in matching grants. A total of $870,000 will go to UC Davis for a variety of activities including training, establishment of vineyard nurseries and development of marketing centers.
"We at UC Davis are eager to be about the business of invigorating Afghanistan's once robust horticultural industry and raising the incomes of Afghan farmers," said Patrick Brown, director of the International Programs Office in UC Davis' College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. "To achieve this, we will be working toward increasing the technical capacity of Afghanistan's table-grape and raisin producers in the provinces of Ghanzi, Kandahar and Parwan."
"In recent years, Roots of Peace has funded the removal of more than 100,000 land mines and unexploded ordinances through the efforts of Afghan de-miners in the Shomali Plains north of Kabul," said Heidi Kuhn, founder and chief executive officer of Roots of Peace, which is the lead agency on the initiative. "We are thrilled to be taking the next steps to replacing the legacy of war with the literal fruits of peace."
Roots of Peace is a non-profit organization founded in 1997 and dedicated to the eradication of land mines by returning de-mined land to productive agricultural use. In addition to developing grape vineyards in Afghanistan, the group is replanting former mine fields in Cambodia with rice, Croatia with orchards and Iraq with wheat.
Other partners in the Roots of Peace consortium are the Afghan Center, a local resource center for Afghan Americans in Fremont, with offices also in Kabul; Agland Investments, a private consulting agribusiness firm; and the private organizations Global Partnership for Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Development Association. Roots of Peace also is supported generously by numerous California vintners.
UC Davis' role
During the next two growing seasons, UC Davis will facilitate the training and implementation of an agricultural extension service, a two-tiered nursery system and development of enhanced postharvest collection and marketing centers. The extension service will be modeled after UC's Cooperative Extension Service, which works with farmers to apply research to problems in production agriculture.
Initially, a series of training workshops will be delivered to 40 extension agents, comprised of University of Kabul graduates and returning employees and recruits from the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. In addition, faculty members from Kabul University will attend these workshops and assist with program development. Eventually, they will assume full responsibility for the extension program.
UC Davis also will assist in establishing nursery facilities in order to begin providing virus-free, adapted plants for a comprehensive vineyard-replanting program. More than 45 percent of Afghanistan's vineyards have been destroyed by a quarter-century of war, and many of the remaining vineyards are in poor health, noted Patrick Brown.
Included in the nursery program will be heritage Afghan cultivars that have been maintained at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's germplasm repository at UC Davis, as well as improved cultivated grape varieties from the world's leading grape-producing countries. The nursery program's central activities will be identification, preservation and optimal utilization of Afghanistan's valuable local grape varieties.
Collection and marketing centers will be developed to help decrease losses of produce following harvest. The centers also will aid in standardizing the quality of the produce and enhancing product safety to help ensure the produce is more marketable and brings higher profit for farmers.
The federal funding is provided to the Roots of Peace consortium by US-AID's Rebuilding Agricultural Markets in Afghanistan Program.
The UC Davis team is composed of Patrick Brown; Farbod Youssefi, program coordinator; and Todd Rosenstock, training coordinator. Collaborating in the UC Davis program will be members of the departments of Pomology and Viticulture and Enology, the Foundation Plant Service and the USDA's Germplasm Repository. Students in the International Agricultural Development Graduate Group also will participate.