Poor sanitation, water shortages, climate change and environmental destruction – Afghanistan grimly illustrates the fate of many nations if we do not act now
Sept. 14, 2010 (The Guardian/UK) -- Sala Khan Khel, 40 miles outside Kabul, looks like a rural paradise at harvest time. Women and children play behind the high mud walls of the old houses, the men thresh the wheat, teenagers pick walnuts and the water coming straight off the snowy mountains high above the village gurgles through the irrigation canals.
But the rural idyll hides conflict, deep poverty and growing environmental degradation. Most families here say they have been uprooted by war in the last 20 years, and that climate change means the seasons have become shorter. Also, the population has grown so much there's not enough land to grow food for everyone. On top of that, they say, the water is polluted and is now a source of conflict.
"We can't earn nearly enough. Compared to 20 years ago we are now much poorer. We have new crop diseases we cannot treat, there's conflict between the herders and the settled farmers, and people are cutting down the forests for fuel," says Mahmoud Saikal, a village elder.
Sala Khan Khel's problems mirror those seen all over Afghanistan and the prospects of this war-torn, hungry country getting anywhere near meeting millennium development goal 7 – which covers water, sanitation and the environment – is zero in the next decade and probably for far longer.
Afghanistan is not just one of the poorest countries in the world, it has some of the very worst human development indicators, comparable to Sierra Leone and Angola. Its development has been tied closely to conflict for decades and it only signed the Millennium Declaration in 2004.
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