Farmers in Afghanistan face several critical challenges, including a lack of essential agricultural inputs and services as well as a lack of access to cash markets and credit. Roughly 1,800 businesses sell agricultural inputs, but the present system is fragmented and ineffective. Most dealers offer a limited variety of products (mainly fertilizer) and technical and marketing services. Through the $3.4 million USAID-funded Afghanistan Farm Service Alliance (AFSA), CNFA is addressing these challenges by forming linkages between Afghan farmer groups and cooperatives, the existing national network of input suppliers and retailers, as well as downstream agricultural processing and marketing enterprises.

AFSA seeks to lay a strong foundation for long-term agricultural development resulting in increasing rural family incomes by catalyzing the growth of rural Farm Service Centers (FSC) providing input supply and output marketing services and linkages. The two-year AFSA program has already established seven cooperatively-owned Farm Service Center enterprises, which, over the life of the program, will provide at least $8.6 Million in quality inputs and services to approximately 20,000 Afghan farmers. This will catalyze an increase of incomes among the target farmer group of approximately 25% annually. One of the established FSCs is entirely owned and operated by women – the first of its kind in Afghanistan.

The overall goal of CNFA’s proposed Afghanistan Farm Service Alliance is to increase the incomes of farmers in Afghanistan. To achieve this goal, CNFA and its AFSA partners have committed to three primary objectives:

• Establish sustainable and improved commercial input supply and farm service infrastructure in Afghanistan.
• Ensure that farmers have affordable, timely and reliable access to quality inputs and services; i.e. seeds, fertilizers, crop protection products and agriculture extension.
• Link farmers to expanding cash market opportunities so that they may fully benefit from productivity and quality improvements brought about from the use of new inputs.

• Through the seven cooperatively-owned FSCs, AFSA will provide distribution of inputs for commodities and subsectors for which national, regional or international market opportunities exist; AFSA members will also provide linkages to output markets for goods produced.
• The primary aim of AFSA is to increase rural incomes through increased access to quality inputs and a complete package of services among poor, smallholder farmers of Afghanistan.
• In working toward this aim, AFSA will place particular emphasis on the creation of a commercially profitable, competitive, private, cooperatively owned Farm Service Center network.
• AFSA will promote recognition for the value of improved input usage and provide an outlet for farmer education, agricultural productivity and cash market linkages helping to reduce poverty and promoting broader development goals in Afghanistan.
• AFSA will promote an unbiased membership and participation of a representative grouping of actors involved in increasing access to inputs among farmers in Afghanistan.
• AFSA will seek cooperative or group ownership of Farm Service Center enterprises, in order to facilitate shared risk and investment among partners, as well as shared profits.

Related Links

New Farm Store in Afghanistan Puts Local Needs First

Program Overview: Afghanistan Farm Store Alliance (PDF)

Updated 6/2009