To help poor Afghan villagers make money on potatoes instead of opium poppies, Idaho farmer Pat Rowe used a little old technology: root cellars. Rowe, 68, whose family raises tubers and wheat on 2,000 acres (809 hectares) near American Falls, Idaho, went to the Central Asian country with a root cellar design common across his home state's famous potato country in the 1930s and 1940s. As part of his work in Bamiyan, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Kabul, Rowe said it was important that his potato sheds not be too sophisticated. They had to be built with materials readily available in the impoverished valley between the Hindu Kush and the Koh-i-Baba mountains with only dirt roads, a gravel runway, scant trees and almost no electricity. Before leaving, he took notes from neighbors on Idaho's Snake River plain who had an old root cellar on their property. “You look at what people are using and see what they are doing,” Rowe said Monday, of his trip. “You don't want to be a crazy foreigner with all these ideas. You've got to be practical with the application.” Rowe went to Afghanistan as part of a $6.4 million (£4.1 million) US Department of Agriculture program meant to fill gaps in Afghanistan's food supply chain and develop agriculture to compete with the forbidden poppies that fuel the country's heroin trade. Rowe's work in January 2006 won mention earlier this month by first lady Laura Bush. She brought up Rowe's root cellars in a speech in France on June 12. “Afghan potato farmers in Bamiyan have learned storage methods from an Idaho potato farmer that are making their crops more profitable,” said Bush, who had made an unannounced trip to Bamiyan four days earlier. Paul Sippola, a program officer for the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit development outfit CNFA, which ran the Department of Agriculture aid program, said Rowe's retro cellar design was used in about 50 potato storage sheds in Afghanistan. It's now being replicated with a few modifications to suit local needs in Pakistan's Kashmir region, where seed potato farmers' livelihoods were devastated by the 2005 earthquake, Sippola said. “It's essentially the same one that Pat developed,” he said in a phone interview. “Pat's work, which started in Afghanistan, has really grown. It's fed over into some of our other programs because the success of it has been really pronounced.” Rowe is a veteran of nearly 30 US government-sponsored trips to developing countries including Egypt, China and Zimbabwe to help promote new agricultural techniques.
