Agricultural reforms are a big part of the solution. It is estimated that we waste a third of the food that we produce. That’s about 1.3 billion tons a year. In addition, a third of our agricultural land is used for animal feed. As the world gets more ‘modernized’ the land devoted to animal feed is expected to rise to cater to the growing demand of the dairy and meat industry.

The answers to resolve this complex issue are not straightforward and require a combination of public policy, awareness, capital, human behaviour change, etc. However, one of the important aspects for the policy makers to consider is our legislative reforms and furthering environmentally friendly agricultural practices such as agroforestry. Agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems to create environmental, economic, and social benefits. There is a lot of work happening all over the world in advancing agroforestry-based solutions.

1. Alley Cropping
Alley cropping involves planting crops between rows of trees. The system can be designed to produce fruits, vegetables, grains, flowers, herbs, bioenergy feedstocks, and more.

2. Multi-story Cropping
The practice of multi-story cropping is based on creating a complimentary ecosystem of trees and shrubs under a forest canopy at different heights to grow food, herbal, botanical, or decorative crops. By providing ideal shade levels to the botanicals, a flourishing biodiverse economically viable forest system can be created.

3. Silvo Pasture
Silvo pasture combines trees with livestock and forage on one piece of land. The trees provide timber, fruit, fodder, or nuts as well as shade and shelter for livestock and their forages, reducing stress on the animals from the hot summer sun, cold winter winds, or a downpour.

4. Riparian Forest Buffers
Riparian forest buffers are natural or re-established areas along rivers and streams made up of trees, shrubs, and grasses. These buffers can help filter farm runoff while the roots stabilize the banks of streams, rivers, lakes and ponds to prevent erosion. These areas can also support wildlife and provide another source of income.

5. Windbreaks
Windbreaks shelter crops, animals, buildings, and soil from wind, snow, dust, and odours. These areas can also support wildlife and provide another source of income. They are also called shelterbelts, hedgerows, vegetated environmental buffers, or living snow fences.

So, if you are wondering how can you influence this change towards more widespread agroforestry practices, here are a few suggestions:

1. Become a lot more aware and conscious of your consumption choices. Start reading food labels of the products that you buy and make a deliberate shift towards products that are more upfront about their production and sources of origin.

2. Start asking your elected representatives about how agroforestry in your region is being encouraged. Often change begins when you ask for it!

3. If you happen to be directly involved in agriculture and food production start developing and implementing agroforestry practices and set an example!

The post 5 ways How Traditional Agroforestry Systems Help in Nature Conservation appeared first on The Sacred Groves.

Canada has some of the world’s lushest forests, accounting for over 9% of the world’s forest areas. About 38% of Canadian land is composed of forest cover. The forests in Canada also have the distinction of being ‘stable’, i.e. less than half a per cent of the forest area has faced deforestation since 1990.

While Governments enact laws to conserve and protect the natural forest cover, it is down to individuals to adopt simple lifestyle changes to save forests in this beautiful country. Consider some changes one can make towards this goal:

#1 Practice ‘conscious Earth-friendly’ behaviour.
An environmentally friendly person is one who is conscious of the impact of their lifestyle on the planet. As a Canadian citizen, you can make simple changes in your daily life to reduce your carbon footprint – power the house with solar panels instead of using fossil fuel-generated electricity, recycle water, install LED bulbs, and use detergents and cleaning materials made from pure plant actives rather than harmful chemicals like bleach. Living with a greater awareness of the resources one uses in daily life, how and where they are produced, how you choose to heat up the house, your use of water and other non-renewable resources, and even the manufacturing processes for the products you use, can ultimately save forests, keep marine ecologies healthier and significantly reduce your home’s carbon footprint.

#2 Recycle, reuse, conserve.
Adopt ‘Recycle and reuse’ as your daily mantra – if something can be put to use multiple times instead of being trashed after one use, or recycled, then the practice must certainly be followed. It is not just about using the nearest recycling station, but of using it properly and often. Ditch the use of single-use plastic and substitute plastic food containers, bottles, straws and other items with glass or metal ones. Meanwhile, conserving resources can be both simple and complex. It could be as basic as switching off the power when not needed, or choosing building materials that do not deplete the forests in Canada (such as wood).

#3 Plant trees around your home.
Keeping your home shaded from the sunlight helps reduce the use of electricity in the summer season. A simple change to make in this regard, is to plant trees around your home and care for them till they become stable. Not only do trees provide shade, they become nesting spots for birds, clear the air by providing oxygen, provide fruits and flowers, and so on. If you cannot plant trees, then aim to cultivate an organic kitchen garden. Growing your own produce is healthy for your home, and reduces the burden on commercial agriculture. Besides this, try reducing your dependence on meat every week and substitute it with vegetables, cereals and grains to lower emissions and save forest wildlife.

#4 Cook only as much as required.
Most households unintentionally discard uneaten food every day – this ends up in landfills and generates greenhouse gases like methane. The forests in Canada bear the brunt of rising greenhouse emissions. Meanwhile, food waste ends up wasting the resources that helped create that food in the first place, right from raw produce to fuel. Do ensure that you cook only as much as the household needs, and donate the uneaten portions to homeless persons instead of junking it. If you have kitchen waste, compost it rather than throwing it away.

Simple changes to everyday life can have a tremendous impact on the forests in Canada. Try and use biodegradable products wherever possible, shop locally instead of having products shipped from other cities or countries, and so on.

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When in 1997, Dutch filmmaker Josepha Wessels arrived in Shallalah Saghirah, a small village on the fringe of the Syrian steppe southeast of Aleppo, it was like stepping back hundreds of  years. “There were all of these wonderful little, white-painted beehive houses,” she says. “It was very rustic and had no electricity supply.” The most remarkable historical artefact, however, was beneath Wessels’ feet. The village’s water arrived via a series of tunnels that were constructed not hundreds but 1,600 years ago. “To some people it sounds dull but the qanats really excited me,” Wessels says.

Qanats were first laid down during the Byzantine-Roman era (395 to 1453CE). They consist of a series of porous subterranean wells connected by gently sloping tunnels that use the force of gravity to transport water to the earth’s surface. They were traditionally used to provide a reliable supply of water to human settlements and to irrigate fields in hot, arid and semi-arid environments.

“In Greek and Roman times the qanats played a key role in the development of empires and thriving cities such as Palmyra,” Wessels, who went on to author a PhD on the topic, explains. Spreading with the Persian empire from south to Egypt and and as far east as India, qanats – also known as kariz – fell out of use from the 1960s on with the advent of diesel-driven pumps and private wells. 

But could they be the answer to the Middle East’s water woes? Today a combination of that 20th century over extraction and climate change has led to a crisis for water tables in the already drought-prone region. Although Wessels warns against a facile link between drought and political instability, a 2020 report by the University of California argues that a severe drought, worsened by a warming climate, drove Syrian farmers to abandon their crops and flock to cities, helping to trigger today’s brutal civil war. 

In troubled Syria and in Iran, Jordan and Oman, water shortages are an increasing threat to both livelihoods and liveability.

Wessels’ chance trip led, in the summer of 2000, to a participatory project in which a small group of Shallalah Saghirah villagers cleaned and renovated their village qanat. Wessels, with colleagues including her hydrologist husband Robertus Hoogeveen, went on to lead similar community-led renovations of qanats in towns including in Al Dumayr, a city located 45 kilometers north-east of Damascus, and Qara near to the border with Lebanon with funds from, amongst others, the Netherlands Government. Wesssels soon found that although over pumping by mechanical means was a feature of qanats falling out of use, often they had simply become blocked with calcareous deposits or debris as communities lost to knowledge, or will to maintain them.

“Qanats are simple technology, but every ten years or so they need to be cleaned out, relined so they don’t collapse and desilted,” Wessels says. “Importantly, you cannot do this without the community working together.” Wessels adds that whilst Iran still boasts individuals capable of building qanats – known as muqannis, and often trained by their fathers – Syria now lacks these traditional skills, and thus relies on ancient qanats laid down hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years ago.

There are obvious attractions in reverting to this ancient water extraction system in our turbulent, heating times. Qanats have the advantage of being resistant to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and to deliberate destruction in war. Furthermore, they are almost insensitive to levels of precipitation, delivering a flow with only gradual variations from wet to dry years. The abandonment of qanats is a warning sign that groundwater in a region is being overexploited, says Majid Labbaf, who has worked on the reconstruction of qanats in Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan. “The drying up of the qanats is an indication of a disconnection between humans and their natural environment,” he says.

Sadly, the city where Wessels original renovation took place is today abandoned due to Syria’s long civil war, although qanats in Al Dumayr and at Qara are still in operation. Wessels hopes that should inhabitants return to Shallalah Saghirah, they’ll find its ancient qanats will still be able to provide sufficient water for community life. Wessels also welcomes bids to recognise qanats as prime examples of Islamic heritage for example in the case of the UNESCO world heritage listing of Persian qanats in Iran. For successful restoration, state actors also need to be involved, she says, as qanats have to work in tandem with modern piped water systems. This, she adds, is not just a case of returning to the ‘old ways’.

“By rehabilitating the qanat system in combination with efficient groundwater management measures water resources, in Syria and elsewhere, can be saved for future generations,” she said. “But for that you need political will, and you need peace.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Robertus Hoogeveen and Lund University

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With its lofty pines and vast, glassy lakes, its rare roaming wood bison and endangered whooping cranes, Fort Chipewyan seems like one of the world’s last true wildernesses. Yet even in this remote spot, with its rich natural resources, the effects of the climate crisis are an ever-more pressing daily reality.

This community of 1,000 souls, many of whom are descended from the Chipewyan, Misikew Cree and Métis First Nations tribes, have for decades had their heat and cooking power supplied by a diesel power station owned by Canadian energy group ATCO, which trucks in its heavy black liquid fuel via barge down the northern Alberta’s waterways, or via the ice roads that form across its lakes and tributaries during the freezing autumn and winter months. The trouble with this arrangement, however, was climate change. With Canada’s north warming nearly three times faster than the global average, both the river barge and ice road seasons are becoming increasingly unpredictable.

In 2018, a group of First Nations leaders in Fort Chipewyan decided that enough was enough. In a joint venture of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association, Three Nations Energy (3NE) they decided to bring an ambitious renewable energy project to their remote community.

“We worked together and we made it happen,” Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said at an event celebrating the completion of the project’s second and final phase.

Replacing 800,000 litres of diesel a year, or 2,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, the Three Nations Energy Solar farm project is Canada’s largest remote off-grid solar farm in Canada, with 5,760 solar panels supplying Fort Chipewyan with 25 percent of its energy needs (in the first phase). The solar farm’s energy will be bought under a long-purchase agreement by ATCO and supplied back to the local grid.

Blue Eyes Simpson, Vice President of the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association and one of the founding directors of First Nations Energy, has lived in Fort Chipewyan all of her life. Simpson is area manager for Parks Canada as well as an advocate for sharing the stories of First Nations elders with younger generations, in a bid to reawaken an imperative for protecting the national environment.

“Our people have a proud tradition of making our livelihood from the sustainable use of local renewable resources,”she says. “We are committed to being good stewards of the land for future generations.”

In a picture in which Canadian native ancestral lands are often denuded and polluted by oil speculation, including neighbouring Fort McKay (where emissions from a controversial oil pipeline project have poisoned plants and fish), Fort Chipewyan is a brighter picture. The Three Nations Energy Solar farm was launched November 17, 2020 with a ceremony at the solar farm in Fort Chipewyan featuring indigenous drummers and prayers as well as tearful thanks from the directors of 3NE.

The group now plans to set up hydroponics food production and support other indigenous green energy initiatives across Canada. This model of use of renewable energy goes to prove, Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says, what can be done if indigenous communities have a 100 percent stake in their natural resources, as well as their future.

“We work with the sun, we work with the wind, we work with mother nature and we work with the water for the children of the future to give them a better life, a cleaner life,” he adds.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 3NE

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At almost 4,000 meters above sea level, the high-altitude grasslands of Peru, known locally as punas, are a complex and increasingly fragile ecosystem. Climate change, the melting of glaciers and unpredictable rain patterns have shrunken the wetlands, with alarming consequences for some of the country’s most vulnerable communities, who depend on them to graze their sheep, alpacas and llamas. Though Peru is home to 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, their size has diminished by 40 percent in the past four decades. As glaciers recede, the drying grasslands force herders to concentrate in smaller areas, leading to intensive grazing practices, which further degrade the puna.

In search of a solution, the residents of Miraflores and Chanchayllo, two small Andean villages in the Nor Yauyos reserve, decided to look back into the past; a bet that has yielded extraordinary results. With the help of the U.S. non-profit The Mountain Institute (TMI) and enlisting Colombian archeologist Alex Herrera, local authorities were able to bring back to life a 1200-year old ancestral hydraulic system. The complex network of waterways had been used for centuries, but it was abandoned in the 17th century when Spanish colonizers forced indigenous populations to relocate.

The silt dams, reservoirs and canals were used by ancient communities to slow the movement of water through the soil and grasses. The slower pace of water they produced mitigated the impact of both floods and droughts, created nutrient-rich soil and expanded the wetlands, allowing for rotational grazing. While livestock and crop productivity have indeed increased since the system was revived, Herrera explains that the success of the project should not be measured in terms of output, but of sustainability. “Andean knowledge is not about maximizing production, but minimizing risks,” he tells us, “and that can be antithetical to the current growth paradigm.

Ancestral technologies look to increment production to provide food for everyone over time, not to increase revenue.”

For the team behind the revival of the waterways, its success lies in its bottom-up participation and collaboration. The initiative was decided upon in community assemblies and relied heavily on local knowledge. The project is not an off-the-peg solution: combining, as it does, complex forms of social organization and an understanding of the ecosystem built over centuries and passed orally across generations.

Though the TMI believes the success of the project raises hopes for highland communities everywhere, Herrera is quick to point out that adapting it to different contexts might prove to be a complex endeavor. “Andean technology is not just material; it is also the capacity to organize work over time and space. This type of solution requires local knowledge and, more importantly, a local commitment to sustain it over time. And this can only come from the communities themselves, not from external actors,” he explains. Listening to indigenous populations, he adds, is a good place to start.

Author: Jimena Ledgard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Grassland banner image and 1. Alexander Herrera Wassilowski, 2. The Mountain Institute

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The future of global infrastructure is to be found on a humble stretch of motorway in the province of Zeeland, in the Netherlands. In 2010 the Dutch government donated a 400-metre strip of the A58 to Erik Schlangen and his team at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the University of Delft, to test the radical idea of creating a road surface capable of healing itself.

The porous mixture of bitumen and aggregate stones used on road surfaces across the globe is a dream to drive on, but costly to maintain. Over several years UV light exposure and tyre pressure cause the binding bitumen to shrink, loosening the aggregate and leading to everything from potholes to damaged windscreens and road accidents. Schlangen realised that by incorporating into a novel asphalt tiny fibres of the steel wool that’s commonly used to scrub domestic saucepans and applying occasional induction heat from a modified vehicle, he could initiate a form of self-repair.

“When you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks and the stones are again fixed to the asphalt,” said Schlangen, demonstrating his self-healing asphalt with a sledgehammer and microwave, in a TED Talk that’s been viewed over a million times.

Repairing the material world that supports our modern lives is costly, both financially and it comes to carbon emissions. In 2009, EU governments invested €4.5 billion into the development and maintenance of EU road networks and corrosion of industrial and transport infrastructure is estimated to cost the global economy US $2.5 trillion a year. The arrival of animate materials promises to radically reduce these expenses as it revolutionises the way we understand our built world.

“Animate materials are more like nature,” says Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London in the UK and author of a 2020 Royal Society report into the potential of animate materials. “Nature makes materials, but these materials look after themselves, they harvest energy from the sun and can heal themselves. That is where the materials of the future will be.”

The revolution has already arrived in the lab, where design breakthroughs in recent years include a a coating for concrete that contains microcapsules that seal cracks when activated by sunlight, developed by researchers in South Korea; ‘living bricks’, made by mixing gelatin, calcite and sand with Synechococcus bacteria, which regenerate in response to temperature and humidity changes, from a team at the University of Boulder in Colorado; and a self-healing coating that can patch up imperfections on metal in matter of seconds from Northwestern University, an advance on the ‘self-healing’ polymers that are already used by Nissan to heal scratches on car bodywork.

One downside to the coming revolution in living materials, Miodownik points out, is that it disrupts established economies of ‘build and repair’. “Potholes drive economic growth,” Miodownik explains, “as companies have contracts to build roads and also repair the potholes in these roads.” The revolution, he adds, will require radical new business models.

Ten years on, studies on the samples from the A58 suggest that the life asphalt road can be doubled to 15 years if induction heat is applied every four years. Erik Schlangen’s road, he is happy to report, remains pothole-free. “Imagine buildings, roads, bridges, walls and perhaps entire cities that have qualities like these, composed of building blocks that can mimic some of the characteristics of cells and that operate autonomously together to promote growth, adaptation and healing,” the Royal Society Report concludes; daring us to dream.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Marc Oliver Jodoin, Ian Taylor, Andy Kuo (Unsplash)

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Combating climate change is the biggest challenge of our times. Three years ago, Bhutan became the world’s first carbon-neutral country, meaning its carbon dioxide emissions are balanced with what is absorbed by its forests. However, this doesn’t make the small Himalayan country immune to the effects of global warming and sadly it is witnessing erratic weather patterns, fast-receding glaciers and glacial lakes outburst floods (GLOFs).

But how do you make the risks of climate change relatable to the average person when the data is dry or comprised of confusingly complex computer simulations? The country that pioneered the ground-breaking concept of prioritising Gross National Happiness above GDP is trialling a potential solution.

In 2014, the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute of Conservation and Environment (UWICE) launched – with funding from the Karuna Foundation and Bhutan Foundation – the Himalayan Environmental Rhythms Observation and Evaluation System, or HEROES, project in partnership with 21 schools located at varying elevations and ecological zones across Bhutan.

To date, it has trained 34 teachers and more than one thousand students in weather-station management, data collection and plant phenology. Working with 23 weather stations (20 in schools and three in remote mountain locations) they record changes in temperature, snowfall and rainfall, as well as monitoring how key plants and animals are responding to changing climatic patterns within the vicinity of their school’s campus and then feed the data back to UWICE. Recently, a school used the data alongside centuries-old chronicles from Kyoto, Japan to predict the changing fruiting pattern of peach trees, which are now flowering multiple times a year.

By harnessing the power of ‘citizen science’ and incorporating it into the high-school curriculum, the project is building a countrywide network of data-collection sites at very little cost, while simultaneously giving the students agency in the climate, and nation, they will inherit. The hope that this will lead to targeted interventions to help ailing ecosystems as it highlights the issue of climate change amongst the general public, including the students’ parents.

The intention is to foster a Bhutanese generation raised on the importance of environmental conservation, says Dr. Chenga Tshering, Deputy Chief Forest Officer with the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute.

“Educating youth on climate change and its impact is one of the greatest benefits of this initiative, “ he says. “We hope our climate-literate youths will become influential climate change activists on the world stage.”

Author: Emma Thomson, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Bhutan banner image – Harisai Abhi/ Wikimedia Commons
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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It is estimated that 20 billion shoes are produced every year. Of these, about 350 million are thrown away every year in the US alone. And they are non-biodegradable. In 2014, athletes Shriyans Bhandari and Ramesh Dhami considered the several pairs of expensive sports shoes they had to discard every year and came up with an idea. Why not recycle the soles of their discarded sports shoes into new shoes? While they were no longer optimum for running, they would do nicely under a pair of slippers… Without any background or experience in shoe manufacturing, the duo probably didn’t even realise that their idea was novel and audacious. Soon, they were able to patent two of their industrial designs and roll out their first line of recycled shoes in 2015. This is how Greensole, a social startup that not only recycles old shoes into new footwear but also distributes them to the barefoot in 13 Indian states, was born.

“Going barefoot exposes people to injuries, parasitic infections and worse. Yet, while food, drinking water and shelter are considered basic to their well-being, wearing shoes is often overlooked,” says Bhandari. “Our retail business and corporate funding ensures that we are able to put shoes on the feet of countless people in the country.”

Here’s what happens to old shoes, once they reach Greensole’s manufacturing unit in Navi Mumbai. After a thorough wash, their uppers and lowers are separated. The lowers are resized; uppers cut for use as straps and laces used in shoe packaging. Even the shoe recycling has a low carbon footprint as it is manually done. The shoes, sold online with minimal advertising, have developed a cult following in India. They’ve featured twice in the India Fashion Week – last in 2019 in collaboration with noted fashion designers Abraham and Thakore.

Partnering with heavyweight corporates such as the Tata Group, Rolls Royce, international shoe brands like Adidas, Crocs and Skechers and over 60 others, Greensole organises old shoe collection and new shoe distribution drives across the country.

“In 2020, we distributed 400,000 shoes to those in need, including returning migrants at Mumbai’s railway stations,” says Bhandari. Corporates front the approximate US$2.7 needed to recycle a single pair of shoes, to be distributed in communities of their choice. Many of them have also organised shoe collection drives with their employees. Meanwhile, Greensole’s retail sales also contribute to their charity work, with a percentage from every shoe sold going into their charity arm. In 2018, Bhandari and co-founder Ramesh Dhami were listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of Asian social entrepreneurs. The same year, they inaugurated their first skilling in Jharkhand, to train women to recycle shoes.

The Greensole model is replicable in countries where low cost manual labour is easily available. Most of all, it is timely. Not only does it reduce the load on the planet’s overflowing landfills, it makes for the barefoot and fashionistas alike, shoes that truly have a soul!

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images credit: Greensole

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Harvest time in Ghoryan, Western Afghanistan and, fingers moving balletically from petals to the baskets at their side, six women pickers chat beneath the folds of their hijabs. The purple flowers filling those baskets represent a means of keeping families fed and clothed in a country in which decades of war have left 15 percent of adult females widowed. Little wonder this novel crop has been locally nicknamed: ‘purple gold’.

Once the world’s biggest producer of raisins and pistachios, by the early 1990s most of Afghanistan’s fertile farmland had been turned over to the production of opium poppies. In a 2010 United Nations report, Afghanistan was found to be the source of 93 percent of the world’s opiates, a trade then representing 46 percent of the nation’s GDP and the principal source of funding for insurgents who have for decades terrorised Afghanistan’s population, including the Taliban. In addition to this grim legacy, opium poppies are a water-intensive crop that has diminished Afghanistan’s soil quality and water table even as global warming puts this semi-arid nation at greater risk of drought.

Enter the The Afghan Women’s Saffron Association (AWSA). Launched in 2011, membership of this all-female cooperative of saffron growers now numbers in the tens of thousands. In a market tightly controlled by male merchants, the association works to achieve fair rates for women cultivators, selling directly to saffron consuming markets in the rich world and, through community outreach programmes, incentivising the transition from opium poppies to saffron by offering advance payments for seed purchasing and to fund heaters to dry the stamens that, too fragile for mechanical methods, need to be picked by hand.

The growers, says AWSA founder Sima Gharvani, have nature on their side. The most prized variety of saffron crocus, the fragrant Negrin, tolerates Afghanistan’s dry winds yet, compared to the opium poppy, is modest in its water consumption. It’s also far more lucrative than that illicit plant, with saffron commanding US$18per gram in global markets, compared to the US$0.10 per gram for opium resin. It is thought this women-led co-operative could be replicable in other drug-war torn global regions in which opium growing is rife, such as Mexico and Columbia.

The association has been a lifeline for women such as Afarin, a 29-year-old who lost her husband in the 2007 Taliban insurgency. In deeply conservative Afghanistan society, widows are stigmatised: considered bad omens at family gatherings and controlled by a strict social code that forbids them from wearing bright colours and laughing in public. Before gaining work in saffron picking and processing via the Ghoryan Women Saffron Association, a regional offshoot of AWSA, Afarin relied on family charity and overseas food aid to feed her three children, two boys and a girl aged 7 to 11. Today, however, she can afford to send her oldest child to school and cover her diabetic mother’s medical bills. “Without the association my children would be hungry,” she says. “Now my life is better. I like coming to work on the harvest; I have made good friends here.”

As in many developing nations, Covid 19 has been a challenge for Afghanistan. The nation lacks healthcare infrastructure and 44 percent of all Afghans, according to the World Food Program (WFP), rely on livelihoods that have been disrupted by the outbreak of Covid-19. In Ghoryan at least, this year’s harvest is a good one and Afarin is hopeful the Negrin crocus, as well as peace, will continue to bloom in Ghoryan. “We take life a day at a time,” Afarin says. “But when I look at a field of flowers, I smile.”

Afghan Women’s Saffron Association (AWSA) saffron can be bought at https://www.facebook.com/NeginSaffron/

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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