Team Number: 02
Team Number: 02
School Name: School of Confusion
Area of Science: Economics
Project Title: Broken Nation - Repaired
After September 11th the United States became more aware of the fact that terroism is an affliction that effects all of us. Our government responded by taking military action in Afghanistan, which is a land locked, underdeveloped country that has delt with some degree of war for centuries. Lack of access to food in Afghanistan was already a widespread chronic issue seriously aggravated by the ongoing civil war and a fragmented economy (http://www.wfp.org/country_brief/indexcountry.asp?country=33#). Our project is focused on projecting the population size that can be sustained by the arable land available and how changes in agricultural practices would effect the output over time. There is widespread unemployment, compounded by very low wages for those who do have work and the gravity of the economic situation has only become worse over the past year, but will not be included in our program. (http://www.wfp.org/country_brief/indexcountry.asp?country=33#). The drought which has severely disrupted food production in the past few years the aggregate domestic cereal output was down by 44 percent over for 1999 (FAO/WFP Crop Assessment Survey, June 2000). This will be an important variable in predicting future productivity
Problem Solution:
In order to determine how many people can be sustained in Afghanistan
several factors must be addressed. First we know that, "population
growth diminishes each person’s share of the nation’s finite arable land,
increasing pressure for food production on each hectare suitable for the
task"(http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm). This decline
and its implications for agriculture had been noted by Vaclav Smil a
distinguished professor at the Univerity of Manitoba. "He argues that
countries with less than 0.07 hectares of arable land per person cannot
feed their populations sustainably without intensive use of synthetic
nitrogen, phosphorus and other fertilizers"
(http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm). "He
arrived at this threshold by examining history’s most successful
traditional cultivation systems, those of eastern Asia, the Nile River
basin, and the Netherlands. He found that these systems were able
sustainably to feed an essentially vegetarian diet to 12 or 13 persons per
hectare of farmland through a closed system that maintained soil fertility
by mixing crops and recycling crop, animal and human wastes"
(http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm). We will use a more
conservative estimate of 2.6 people per acre, since most of the land in
Afghanistan is less fertile than other regions
(http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/afghanista_pop72.jpg
(http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm). This can be
considered the, "land’s human "carrying capacity," a term some ecologists
use to suggest the maximum population of any species that an ecosystem or
area can support" (http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm).
Therefore it is also important to include the current population of
26,813,057 and the population growth rate of 3.48% which includes a birth
rate of 41.42 births/1,000 and 17.72 deaths per 1,000 and a net migration
of 11.11 per 1,000 and reflects the continued return of refugees from Iran
(http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html). Differences
in land quality, farmer capabilities and the possibility of external
sources of food complicate the relationship and are not considered as
variables in our project. We will address the issue of bringing
Afghanistan's pasture land, currently 46%, into crop production
by counting it as half as fertile as the arable land, which currently is
12% of the total land area
(http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm). "A Planting Survey
for 2001 conducted by the VAM Unit showed results indicating an
exceptionally low level of planting"
(cidi.org/humanitarian/wfp/01a/ix114.html). The survey showed that the
reduction in planting of all crops has been widespread and significant.
"Farmers in 8 out of the 24 provinces surveyed reported cultivating less
than half of the land they normally use"
(cidi.org/humanitarian/wfp/01a/ix114.html). Although precipitation was
well within normal ranges farmers reported perceived levels of rainfall
that were low leading to reduced planting
(cidi.org/humanitarian/wfp/01a/ix114.html). This explains their trend of
moving towards drought-resistant crops and the pessimistic view of
climatic conditions, and it is clear that farmers everywhere except in the
east and north-east are preparing themselves for another year of drought
(cidi.org/humanitarian/wfp/01a/ix114.html). Based on this information we
have decided to use the area of arable land as one of our variables in
addition to the total land area of Afghanistan which allows us to
determine necessary percentages.
Progress to Date:
We have determined the major variables that we will
include in our program and we have begun to establish what assumptions we
are making. First, all indiviuals must be vegetarian, water availability
and soil fertility must be constant (meaning that irrigated land would
have to increase to include pasture land, which we assume is not currently
being irrigated). In addition to the idea that all other aspects of the
socieity would remain stable and this does not include any damage that may
have been done to the current agriculture infrastructure in the country.
The mathematical model used is the Malthusian Growth Model which will
incorporate a carrying capacity to make it more realistic.
Expected Results:
We want the program that we develop to allow the
user
to select some of the variable values, so that the program can be used for
other parts of the world. We hope that it will output the number of
people that can be supported per acre of arable land, which will relate to
values that we can find for Afghanistan or other similar countries in
previous years. Then we will enhance the program to project the change
sustainabiltity of the population based on changes in the economic
condition of the society.
http://www.cnie.org/pop/conserving/landuse2b.htm http://www.wfp.org/country_brief/indexcountry.asp?country=33# www.wfp.org/appeals/bluebook/by_countries/AFG.pdf-Microsoft Internet http://www.afghan-web.com/economy/basics2.html http://www.cidi.org/humanitarian/wfp/01a/ix114.html http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html FAO/WFP Crop Assessment Survey, June 2000
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