National Alternative Livelihood Policy (2012-2024).

The National Alternative Livelihoods Policy is an instrument covering the period 2012-2024, whose overall goal is to strengthen and diversify legal rural livelihoods by tackling the root causes and drivers of dependency, on the part of subsistence and marginal farmers and laborers, on cultivation of narcotic crops including chronic unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, indebtedness to narco-entrepreneurs, and inequities in access to natural resources and funding opportunities. Specific objectives include (a) to assist farmers, laborers and rural communities affected by the Government’s counter narcotics campaigns with a package of comprehensive, locally-adapted and practical interventions which could alleviate poverty, food insecurity and have a lasting impact on livelihoods, and (b) to assist farmers, laborers and rural communities who have consciously decided not to engage in the production of narcotics, through direct cultivation or through supply of labor, with a package of comprehensive, practical and sustainable interventions. This Policy assumes that opium poppy cultivation has a direct relationship with insecurity and that it is a moving target in the sense that exerting coercive pressure in one area will force the cultivation to move to adjacent areas.
The instrument seeks to help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Among other actions, the policy foresees strategic reserves for grain through local procurement which would improve food security and provide incentives for the farmer to grow wheat and other commodities.
Further the policy seeks to make agriculture more productive ans sustainable. Establishment of food security plans, reforestation, rejuvenation of natural pastures and rangeland and equitable use of these resources is envisaged.
The document also adresses eradication of rural poverty.
With a view to enabling more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems, the policy promotes investments in the agricultural sector, especially through projects on research, extension services, training, micro-finance, processing facilities and marketing. Further actions regard reform of cooperatives and farmers’ associations; provision of agricultural inputs and adapted technology; equity in accessing natural resources such as land and water and establishment of water harvesting and watershed management systems; improving land tenure security in order to improve the chances for licit crop production and to allow farmers to justify longer-term investments in new production.