Impacts of the 20-year war on crop planting and food security in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

The 20-year war in Afghanistan has had a catastrophic impact on agricultural planting and food security, but the assessment was difficult due to a lack of existing statistics. We used 30m Landsat data to extract the annual planting area and built the time series to measure the condition of agriculture, and used constant nighttime light data to quantify the impact of the war. Combined with climate, Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, etc., we quantitatively analysis the impact of the war using regression model. From a time perspective, the total planting area reached peek during some period of relative pacification, but maintained a low level of planting most time. From a spatial perspective, the main planting areas shifted from east to west. Both poppy and wheat planting have a high correlation with non-natural factor, while wheat affected more by natural conditions compared with poppy. In addition, the cultivation of wheat is limited by poppy. As a verification, we collect relative history records to explain the rationality of the result of analysis. According to the result, we reveal the adverse effects of war on agricultural planting and food security in Afghanistan and provide a reference for relevant researches on war and agriculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Remote sensing
• agricultural planting
• food security
• Afghanistan war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on Google Earth Engine at https://code.earthengine.google.com, where can get the data by reference key words ‘LANDSAT/LE07/C02/T1_L2’, ‘LANDSAT/LT05/C02/T1_L2’ and ‘LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_L2’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 42371281] and the Department of Science and Technology of Henan Province: [Grant Number 201400210100].