Fertile grounds for peace!

10/2006 - I continued to reveal my "recipe for peace" as I explained that in addition to grafting, Roots of Peace has shown farmers how to build multiplication nurseries to grow saplings from cuttings pruned off existing vines. These nurseries—17 in 2005 and 38 in 2006—will help quickly replace missing vineyards destroyed by war and drought. Creating this supply of new plants, expected to be over 300,000 in 2006, is vital to rebuilding production. The demand for saplings is so high that one farmer made over $4,000 off of his nursery! Now, President Karzai’s eyes were really lighting up!

Together with farmers, the Roots of Peace program has built over 1,000 trellising demonstration plots in private vineyards—to show farmers the benefit of this technique on their own grapes in their own fields. The advantage of the trellis is three-fold:
It keeps grapes off the soil where they are susceptible to disease; it makes work for the farmers easier; and leaves more room on the ground for additional plants (no poppies!)
These benefits combine to double the farmers’ income. Roots of Peace has published a manual that shows farmers how to use readily available supplies and equipment to buld the concrete poles themselves for less than USD $7 each! (My own father was in the concrete block business that helped to build San Francisco, so I spoke with a voice of pioneer spirit experience!)

NEW ROOTS IN AFGHANISTAN means helping Afghan products reach international markets and will help them take their own giant footstep forward toward self-sustainability in the creation of alternative livelihood programs. Roots of Peace helped merchants sell over 100mt of chilled fresh grapes in 2005 to markets Afghanistan has never reached before: Germany, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, India, and yes…even to Russia with love!

WALK THE TALK means opening new market channels, as Roots of Peace opened the formal first trade between Kabul and Moscow through “clusters of grapes” in sharp contrast to the “clusters of bombs” that sowed seeds of hated into the soils of Afghanistan in the 1970’s. Now, this was fertile grounds for peace!