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McNamara and fellow Purdue agri-cultural economist Ken Foster went to Afghanistan in August to select the first group of Kabul faculty who will come to Purdue to work on master's degrees under a new fellowship program. Others will begin programs at collaborating universities, such as the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, a frequent research partner with Purdue.
Long term, Safi says, the Kabul agriculture faculty need continued support for graduate study, training in new research and teaching technologies, and opportunities for collaborative research.
A worldwide effort
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| Six other Kabul University agriculture faculty arrived at Purdue in January to work on graduate degrees. Students return to a revitalized Kabul University. The campus was destroyed during Afghanistan's civil war. |
Continued funding is essential to the rebuilding process, McNamara says. To date, reconstruction at Kabul is financed by $4.2 million in monetized funds—aid in the form of U.S. food commodities, which can then be sold overseas—from the USDA and a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development. McNamara and Lowenberg-DeBoer are hopeful that universities, governments and private foundations around the world will provide additional support. "The city and the university have no operating budget funds," McNamara says. "Right now, more foreign investment is going toward rebuilding the country's infrastructure than is going for higher education."
Rebuilding education will help the beleaguered nation secure its future, McNamara says. "Afghanistan has virtually no commercial agriculture. Farming methods are very primitive. It's still mainly the type of low-input, subsistence farming that existed 30 years ago, or even 300 years ago. There is no in-country food processing other than traditional drying, and Afghan products are not competitive in domestic markets," he says. "It will require education of its people for the agriculture sector and general economy to grow."
"With problems come opportunities," says Lowenberg-DeBoer about the events that led to Purdue's connection to Kabul. Faizi will attest to it.
Contact Olivia Maddox at
maddoxol@purdue.edu
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Purdue precedent
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