Photo: Abdul Majeed Goraya/IRIN

Farmers say they have been forced to smuggle fertilizers to areas where they are banned

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KHAR,  – Along a road leading to the Bajaur tribal area on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, two men cast stealthy glances around them as they guide donkeys carrying bags covered with blankets.

As they approach a check-post manned by Pakistani soldiers, the men scramble up a hillside with their consignments, hoping to make their way around the barrier undetected. The men are not carrying drugs or weapons, per se, but outlawed plant fertilizers which they hope to sell to farmers in Bajaur.

The ban on ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate and calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizers was imposed in Malakand Division – comprising the Dir, Swat, Chitral and Malakand districts of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) – in November 2009 by the NWFP government, following reports that those chemicals were used by militants to make explosives.

“Fertilizers which contain nitrates have been used by militants to make homemade bombs. This is why the restriction has been placed,” Malakand Commissioner Abdul Karim Khattak said.

Neighbouring Afghanistan imposed a similar ban last week and is already facing a barrage of criticism from farmers.

Hunger threat

The restrictions were also imposed by authorities in Bajaur, which adjoins Malakand.

In Khar, the principal town of Bajaur, 40-year-old farmer Mobeen Khan told IRIN that the ban was affecting crop yields and food security.

“Without these, we cannot farm our lands,” Khan said. “Already crops have been badly affected and many farmers are desperate to save what they can. We need the crops not only to sell but to feed our own families, or they will starve. There is no choice now but to buy fertilizers at inflated rates from smugglers who bring them in from neighbouring districts, especially Lower Dir.”

While the ban is supposed to be only for fertilizers that contain nitrates, Khan alleged that all kinds of fertilizers had been banned in Bajaur and shops previously selling them had been closed down. “In some cases this is just a means used to harass people or extort bribes,” Khan said.

Photo: Abdul Majeed Goraya/IRIN

Bajaur is one of the areas of Pakistan worst hit by militant activity

NWFP Minister of Agriculture Arbab Ayub Jan told the media soon after the ban was imposed that the government would provide fertilizer to farmers through Model Farm Services Centres (MFSC), where the identity of buyers would be checked to “ensure they are farmers”.

Abdul Uthmankhel, a 65-year-old local farmer, said the government’s decision to sell through MFSCs was “pointless in Bajaur” as there were only “two such centres in the whole agency with very few members”.

“The fertilizer ban simply means we will suffer even more. Crops of wheat and maize are being affected. When we were young men we knew how to manage without fertilizer, but the farmers of today are completely dependent on them,” Uthmankhel said.

Muhammad Jamal, head of the Soil and Environmental Sciences Department at NWFP Agricultural University in Peshawar, said “local farmers have been using such fertilizers for decades. Their lack of availability will greatly affect crop production.”

“Even my potato crops are less than usual. On the hillsides here we only have small areas of land to farm and if the crops fails it really affects us badly,” said Wali Khan, 50, a local subsistence farmer. He said buying smuggled fertilizer “is simply not an option because the rates are too high”.

Bajaur, where a military operation has been ongoing since late 2008, is one of the areas of Pakistan worst hit by militant activity. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at the end of 2009, some 250,000 people were displaced from Bajaur.

The agency has also seen a succession of militant attacks, the latest when a suicide bomber killed 16 people at a market in Khar on 30 January.

kh/at/ed source.irinnews

Photo: Adel Yahya/IRIN

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SANAA,  – With the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Yemen having reached 250,000, more than double the number that existed before the current round of fighting between the army and Houthi-led rebels broke out on 12 August 2009, aid workers and local officials have warned of a lack of shelter and basic services for them.

“Despite three existing IDP camps in Hajjah governorate which are continually being expanded, the lack of adequate shelter is a major concern for UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency],” Andrej Mahecic, UNHCR spokesperson, said at a press briefing on 29 January 2010.

“Many displaced Yemenis are in makeshift sites which have mushroomed along the roads leading to the camps. The situation is equally difficult in Amran province where the vast majority of IDPs is either staying with relatives and friends or renting accommodation,” he said, adding that the refugee agency and its partners were providing tents to displaced families in host communities.

The intermittent conflict since 2004 had displaced some 120,000 people in and around Saada Governorate prior to the start of the sixth and most intense round of clashes in August last year, according to UNHCR.

Fighting moving

“Over the past six weeks, we have been witnessing a steady influx of around 1,000 families [some 7,000 people] arriving to Hajjah province, west of Saada, each week,” Mahecic said. He said fighting was gradually moving northwest from the Saada city area towards Razeh, Ghamr and Saqain districts, where the majority of people displaced over the past six weeks were coming from.

Abdullah Dhahban, a local councilor in Saada, told IRIN on 30 January that IDP camps were becoming crowded with new arrivals. “I noticed this problem in Mazraq Camp in Hajjah where up to five families [about 35 people] take shelter in one tent for up to five days until they are registered to get tents and other basic relief items,” he said.

He said because many IDPs arrive in al-Mazraq without identification documents, “their identities need to be attested by local council members or ‘aqils’ [village chiefs] from their areas, which delays their registration by camp management committees in order to get ration cards and be eligible for assistance”.

Dhahban expected the number of IDPs to continue increasing as a result of ongoing clashes in various Saada districts, as well as in Amran governorate’s Harf Sufyan area.

“Serious humanitarian crisis”

Photo: Adel Yahya/IRIN

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned on 25 January of a “serious humanitarian crisis in the making” if no immediate action is taken to counter the worsening IDP situation.

IDPs at al-Mazraq camp queue for food at lunch time. An aid official said “the needs of the people clearly exceed the capacity of the humanitarian response”>

“The conflict in the north of Yemen has been neglected for far too long, and the situation is made even worse by poverty and a lack of water and food,” Dominik Stillhart, ICRC’s deputy director for operations, said. “Most importantly, security conditions have continued to deteriorate, which has also made our work much more difficult and dangerous.”

Following a short visit to northern Yemen, Stillhart said because “the needs of the people clearly exceed the capacity of the humanitarian response” local citizens were becoming increasingly frustrated.

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