An Afghan Think-Tank Study Finds that Southwest Bare Land has Become Home to Up to 2.2 Million People

“What is more, this frontier area is located beyond the reaches of the Helmand and Farah rivers and the canal system that the Afghan state built to increase the taxable agricultural area,” the report says and adds, “Yet in 2016 there were 472,838 hectares of agricultural land, where there had only been 254,866 in 2008 and 143,060 in 2003.” According to the study, this expansion did not occur through state intervention or donor projects in the kind of large-scale irrigation works seen in the past, but was the result of households capturing and purchasing what had once been designated as “government land,” then investing in improved technologies.