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Orchard Establishment in the North East of Afghanistan This project is funded by USAID. The Client is AECOM-PADCO and Roots of Peace (RoP) is one of their implementing partners. This tells the story of our work and is taken from a report written by the Director of Horticulture from the Afghanistan Ministry of Agriculture as a result of her visit to see our project. Roots of Peace works in Khash, Jurm, Baharak, Warduj, Shohada, Keshom and Tagab Districts since early 2007. We have distributed some seventy thousand improved grafted saplings such as sweet cherries, apricots, peaches, walnuts, apples, almonds, and cherries, to carefully selected farmers and twenty thousand improved grafted saplings to cooperative members. The money collected from farmers who purchase the saplings at a subsidized rate is put in respective bank accounts of their cooperatives. We also provide training and extension work to farmers incorporating basic good horticultural practices from land selection and orchard layout through to irrigation, weeding and pruning etc. We identified fruit merchants, facilitated their communication with the producers and provided training in fruit processing, drying, storing and packaging of fruit products to international standards. Next to our office Baharak district is our training center, ROP has imported and installed 4 German made solar dryers in which fruits and vegetables are dried Each dryer can dry 420 kg of fruit in two days. Two of the dryers are installed in our training centre in Baharak; we installed one, and provided training for the farmers cooperative members in Jurm, and we installed and provided training in Faizabad to the lady members of AECOM-PADCO’s Women’s Section.
At the center of Shohada district we put up a large walnut storage warehouse. Here Mr. Azizi – our Business Development and Marketing Officer is explaining about the use of the warehouse – which is now completed.
In this warehouse a walnut shelling machine is installed operated by one man with six women - both almonds and pistachios can be shelled. Ten more machines are due to be installed in the near future.
We have established 528 commercial orchards, 302 demonstration plots, 90 fruit nurseries and 36 germplasm plots. To date we have facilitated the sale of 164 tons of walnuts and 3.3 tons of walnut kernels and 6.8 tons of dried cherries with total value of US$ 260,000 through agriculture cooperatives, thus not only providing farmers with a market, but also capitalizing their cooperatives. Most recently we have managed to “bust the myth” which was that fresh fruit cannot survive the long and difficult road journey to Kabul. We have facilitated Afghan traders to buy cherries from farmers in Badakhshan, transport then to Kabul and sell them at a net profit Lastly, although codling moth control (for apples) was not included in the original program, we provided mechanical methods i.e. installation of trap and carton paper on tree trunks which had positive results in 2007. This process continues in 2008.
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