Twenty-year old Shakila has never enjoyed the casual warmth and style of a cashmere sweater. “Keeping goats and sheep for more than a decade I honestly didn’t recognize its value,” she told an interviewer visiting northern Jowzjan province recently.
Roya, a 40-year-old mother of nine, is the sole provider for her children. She works throughout the day to bake the distinctive Afghan flatbread known as naan in a windowless room. Her face is swaddled in a covering both white with flour and dark with soot.
Most Afghans enjoy candy with their tea every day. The market for candy is strong.
Abdul Hadi has been farming for almost 10 years in his Southern Kandahar village. Tending his crops, however, was always a struggle because of the decrepit irrigation infrastructure available to the area. “Less than half of the farmers could afford to irrigate their farmland by water-pumps and the rest of the lands were left barren. Even some of the farmers were obligated to leave their villages”, Hadi asserted during a rare break from surveying his crops. The winter is particularly difficult for Hadi because like most area farmers, he cannot grow and is forced to purchase imported vegetables from Pakistan.
Two-wheel tractors are changing the landscape for Afghan farmers in more ways than one. They're changing the types of crops farmers grow, the cost to grow them, and the amount of income from crop sales and agricultural services.
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