The US’s agricultural reconstruction work in Afghanistan and Iraq not only gives easy entry to US agribusiness and pushes neoliberal policies, something that has always been a primary function of US development assistance, but is also an intrinsic part of the US military campaign in these countries and the surrounding regions. These are not unique cases born from unusual circumstances, but constitute a likely template for US activities overseas, as it continues to expand its “war on terror” and pursue US corporate interests.

Afghanistan: Food and Bombs

When the US began its campaign of bombing Afghanistan in 2001, one of its first targets was the Soviet-built Shindand airfield in the west of the country, near the border with Iran. A year later, the US took control of the airfield, one of the largest in the country, amid accusations that it intended to use the site as a possible base for operations against Iran. Today the area around Shindand remains a scene of intense warfare between US/NATO and Taliban forces, with civilians caught in the middle.

In the war in Afghanistan, bombs and food are a package deal. At the very airfield from which the US planes launched their deadly attack, US forces had established an agricultural training centre just months before. “The agricultural centre has many positive effects for both the troops and the local population,” says a leader with the US Special Forces civil affairs team. “This allows us to build a rapport with the villagers through education and employment; therefore, they are given a reason to think twice about allowing the anti-Afghan forces to step in and influence their lives in a negative way. The presence of this agricultural centre is a security measure in and of itself.”1 Its explicit objective is to give a positive spin to the US occupation.

The US officials say that the centre will eventually build up agricultural production for export in the area and wean local farmers away from producing poppies – a crop that still provides more security and income to farmers than the millions of dollars in foreign aid, so little of which trickles down to them. The centre is equipped with laboratories, classrooms, several fish ponds with hatcheries, vineyards and orchards. A weather station and drip irrigation system are planned. All of it is run by the US military.

To the south-east, USAID contracted the US firm Chemonics Inc. to build an agriculture centre outside Lashkar Gah, a city in the province of Helmand, another area of intense conflict with the Taliban. Chemonics is an international firm that specializes in private sector development and agriculture, and operates under the slogan “to catalyse agribusiness”2. It was founded in Washington in 1975, and since then USAID has been its major client3. Chemonics says that the location originally chosen for the agriculture centre, in a farming area, was rejected; they were instead “instructed” for “strategic military and security considerations” to establish it at the Lashkar Gah airfield, which is under the control of the UK military4. It is clear that the line between the military and aid objectives has been blurred – and purposely so.

Rather than genuinely helping Afghans to recover their old farming skills, the agriculture centres provide a veneer of agricultural reconstruction to a military mission that is destroying Afghanistan’s food systems. They are an attempt to legitimize the military bases of an occupying power.

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) that the UK and US deploy in the Afghan countryside with increasing frequency serve a similar purpose to the agriculture centres. A PRT typically consists of 60–250 military personnel, a USAID field officer and a US State Department political officer.

Some of the PRTs are called Agricultural Development Teams, and they have a specific agricultural mission. These teams also make critical contributions to military operations. “It helps in the military kinetic part because it involves cooperation of the local population, and intelligence resources can be brought to bear”, explains Army Major-General King E. Sidwell. “It makes friends when you might not otherwise be able to make friends.”5

Agribusiness grows on the battlefield

The support between the military and agricultural work runs both ways. While agricultural reconstruction facilitates US/NATO military operations, the military operations push forward the agenda of US and other foreign-based agribusiness corporations by creating a context where they can easily put pressure on the government to adopt neoliberal policies. The war provides these corporations with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming “reconstruction” industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global production networks and markets in the long term.

Seeds are at the centre of these processes. Those “rebuilding” Afghanistan’s agriculture zoomed in on exactly that. In 2002 a global multi-partner exercise with 34 organizations was brought together under the banner of the CGIAR, with US and Australian funding. This Future Harvest Consortium to Rebuild Agriculture in Afghanistan (FHCRAA) lasted about a year, within which time it imported and distributed several thousand tonnes of wheat seed from Pakistan and set up seed multiplication programmes for varieties of other crops that it brought in from the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Syria.6

The Consortium and other CGIAR-led initiatives have completely bypassed the rich heritage of farmers’ varieties in Afghanistan, which would have provided the basis for genuine agricultural reconstruction. According to an ICARDA survey conducted in 2002, neither rain-fed rice varieties nor rain-fed and irrigated wheat varieties that have been supplied by the aid organizations have included any Afghan genetic materials. The authors of the survey concluded that Afghan wheat farmers are “on their own when it comes to replicating and reselecting local variety seed”.7

Afghanistan has instead been deluged with all manner of foreign seed varieties, some of which have come through projects with foreign seed companies seeking to test their varieties in a potential future market. Concerns were raised early on about the indiscriminate importing of seeds and the disregard of local seeds, prompting the FAO8, ICARDA9 and the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture to propose a Code of Conduct for seed aid in 2002. But any concern for farmers’ seeds has been overrun by the insistence of the US and EU on crafting a seed industry in Afghanistan allied to their larger political agendas. Essentially this means building up a few local seed companies that can initially serve as a conduit for seed aid, and later, if the US wins the war, open the door to foreign seed companies and agribusiness.

Rebuilding Iraq

Iraq has long been important to the US as a market for its agricultural commodities. While it is true that the US has long-term interests in developing such a market in Afghanistan, Iraq is already the number one destination for its hard red winter wheat exports and a top destination for its rice10. It is a US$1.5bn market that wasn’t accessible to US companies before the invasion, because of the sanctions11. Indeed, controlling the development of Iraq’s agriculture and food systems was so important to the US that in the early years of its occupation it brought in Dan Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive and a veteran insider with US trade delegations, to be in charge of this sector.12

Dan Amstutz was put in charge of the USAID’s Agriculture Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq (ARDI). This work, which was managed by one of USAID’s most trusted private contractors, Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), focused on accelerating “the transition from a command-and-control production and marketing system to a market-driven economy where farmers and agribusinesses are able to take risks and realize profits”.13

At the top of ARDI’s list was wheat, Iraq’s most important food crop. In the field, ARDI’s work with wheat focused on the import, multiplication and distribution of certified wheat seed14. Its central objective was to liberalize and privatize Iraq’s wheat sector, and its Public Distribution System in particular15. While the chaos following the US invasion made an immediate sell-off or dismantling of Iraq’s wheat sector impossible (and illegal under the Geneva Convention), ARDI tried to push the Iraqis down the alternative path of neoliberal reforms that could arrive at the same ends while sidestepping political sensitivities and immediate practical problems16. Some of this privatization is now being implemented in Iraq through the “International Compact with Iraq” – a five-year plan negotiated by the Iraqi government with the World Bank, the US and other major donors17. Whatever the eventual outcome, the combined devastation of Iraq’s wheat production and the opening of its wheat markets to US imports, both brought about by the US invasion, has yielded billions of dollars for US grain companies.

When ARDI came to a close in 2006, USAID launched two new programmes – a US$343 million Inma Agribusiness Program18 and Izdihar (Iraq Private Sector Growth and Employment Generation)19. Both programmes are designed to prepare the way for agribusiness investment in the food industry.

Yet, like similar programmes in Afghanistan, these agriculture reconstruction programmes also serve a military function and are immersed in military operations. Of the US$250 million of “reconstruction” funds that the US has so far spent on the 581 agricultural projects that it has either proposed, planned or completed since the beginning of the invasion, more than 97 percent of the projects have been paid for with funds from the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (CERP), which is managed by the “Multi-National Corps-Iraq”. Funding for agriculture reconstruction in Afghanistan is also dominated by a similar CERP, meaning that, in both cases, it is the military that ultimately decides which projects get done.

The USAID and other so-called civilian programmes in Iraq work with PRTs – modelled on the PRTs that were first set up in Afghanistan. A December 2008 report by the United States Institute of Peace, “an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress”, provides more details about how the PRTs relate to the US military mission in Iraq:

“PRTs tend to play a supporting, advisory role for the military, providing them with civilian expertise they would not otherwise have access to and offering suggestions on how to shape operations. As one member of a PRT working in a counter-insurgency environment in Baghdad said, ‘The military is the blunt instrument; we provide the fine tuning.’ Nonetheless, in counter-insurgency environments, the military has the unambiguous lead, and freely ignores PRT’s advice if, in their judgment, security concerns dictate.…”20

It now seems likely that, under President Obama, the PRTs’ importance to the US mission will greatly expand. According to a report in the New York Times on 3 December 2008, “Pentagon planners” are proposing “relabeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be ‘re-missioned’, their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis”21 As a result of this ploy, the Pentagon intends to keep as many as 70,000 troops in Iraq beyond 2011, which is the date established in the US–Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) for the complete withdrawal of all combat troops.

Conclusion

It would be dangerous to see the integration of the US military operations and aid work in Afghanistan and Iraq as an aberration. The same merging of “hard” and “soft” power under the military in Afghanistan and Iraq is happening with US overseas programmes in other parts of the world.

It is essential for people around the world to stop aid being hijacked in this way. Aid policies and practices need to be rethought. This has to go hand in hand with demanding demilitarization and an end to the wars in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. No matter how good aid work is, it will not contribute towards genuine reconstruction if it is also being used to reinforce the military interests of the principal donor country and to maintain its hegemonic dominance.