Afghanistan Peace CampaignYou can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
Climate scientists have long predicted that droughts would hit Afghanistan more severely and more frequently as the planet heated up, so it is no surprise that the country is suffering its fourth drought in five years. What is surprising is that the national wheat harvest, grown on 70 to 80 per cent of agricultural land and supplying more than 65 per cent of Afghans’ dietary energy, has done so well this year. Until recently, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told AAN, an average wheat harvest would have been 4.5 million metric tonnes and a good harvest 5 million tonnes. The estimate for the 2025 harvest is 5.36 million tonnes, a ‘good year’ by historical standards, and this, despite the below-average rain and snowfall. It is a result of the mass distribution of wheat seeds bred to be tolerant of drought and pests.
This report starts with the weather and a scrutiny of the agroclimate data, before hearing from farmers and then looking at the wider panoply of economic shocks hitting Afghans. Rain and snowfall were below-average in the winter and spring of 2024/25 and temperatures above-average. The snowpack was also smaller than previously. This is the densely compacted snow that lies on Afghanistan’s mountains and which, when it melts in spring, should provide irrigation water for farmers downstream. This year, there was less meltwater than usual and it came early because of the high temperatures. Despite all these far-from-ideal growing conditions, there was enough precipitation for farmers growing winter wheat, especially when sowing the improved seed varieties. We hear about their generally positive experiences with the wheat seeds.
The report also hears from farmers for whom the drought is a catastrophe, particularly those with rainfed land or who have livestock or orchards in places like Daikundi. One orchard grower in that province described his almond trees losing their blossom and the springs drying up because of a dry cold spell and lack of rain in the spring. A farmer with livestock in the same region told AAN, “There is no grass for the livestock in the mountains,” and “the little water that was available is now contaminated and making the animals sick.” Unlike last year, another interviewee said, when the sale of sheep and goats brought in money, enabling people to “solve many of life’s problems,” this year, no one was buying livestock because there was nothing to feed them on: “People are just watching the wrath of nature,” he said, “and can do nothing.” The rangeland pasture failed across much of the north, west and centre of the country, leaving livestock weakened by hunger and vulnerable to disease. Also, across those regions, with the exception of Takhar province in the northeast, rainfed wheat either failed to blossom and fill out, or farmers, seeing the failure of the spring rains, decided not to sow at all.
Many of our interviewees always live on a knife-edge, but this year, economic shocks are assailing them from all sides. One man, a teacher, who also has livestock, said that usually, families have several income streams, all limited, but taken together, they can manage: one or two men would be working in Iran and sending money home and there would be “some produce from agriculture and donations from international charitable institutions.” This year, he said, “the situation was utterly different” and it was not just “this severe drought.”
The report ends by looking at how so many of those other, non-farming income streams have also dried up. It surveys the repercussions of Washington entirely cutting USAID funding to Afghanistan, which include severe cuts to food aid. It has lost 40 per cent of its funding. The IPC said that, on average, only 625,000 people out of the almost 1.6 million expected to experience large food gaps resulting in very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality will receive food assistance in the period up to October. The World Food Programme told AAN how they have had to scale back their famine prevention response, both in terms of geographic coverage and a delay in starting it. That is partly because of funding shortages and partly so that it could give some help to the hundreds of thousands of Afghans forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan.
Those returnees, arriving back in chaos and misery, also represent an additional cost to communities and the state. For some households, who had single working men sending money home, there is also a loss of remittances. Some families are also facing the loss of a salary as the Islamic Emirate cuts public sector jobs, both military and civilian, by a fifth. Such cuts are no surprise to anyone following its relentless expansion of the workforce, especially the armed forces, since coming to power. However, the timing is grim. Additionally, the Emirate’s focus on the security sector, at the expense of public services, has left those services – health, agricultural support and food security – vulnerable to the current cuts in foreign aid.
Agriculture remains the backbone of Afghanistan’s economy. Approximately one-third of the population has access to agricultural land. Farming supports not only those who grow crops and keep livestock to eat or sell, but also those who work others’ land – it is the largest employer in the country. The good national wheat harvest this year is welcome news, but it can only ever mitigate the multiple pressures facing so many Afghan families.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Rachel Reid
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.