Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shows the money value of all final goods and services produced only within the geographical boundaries of a country by using the natural resources of the country.
Refer to above definition of GDP; Afghanistan is also one of the Asian developing countries with proper growth of GDP in spite of security challenges in the last decade.
Since 2004 Afghanistan was witness to have many international private and public sectors investing in Afghanistan in many sectors as Agricultures, Health, Transportation, Communication, handmade resources and even providing grants and credits for the Government of Afghanistan as WB, UN agencies and other NGOs.
However Afghanistan GDP growth is sensible year by year since 2004, but it is very difficult to get the correct and proper graph level of GDP growth for each year. Because there is no proper index system to show the actual report of GDP growth, but as per World Bank report, stated that “Afghanistan GDP growth has been reached to 10% from 2009 – 12”.
As far as GDP growth depends on economic development of many sectors but due to shortage of space. I am going to write about only one of them and that is: “Rule of Law”.
Domestic Preferences is mentioned in Afghanistan’s law on how to prefer the Domestic Products rather than external products, but this part of the law has been always ignored by the consumers, while purchasing such goods which both domestic and external products are available in the country and the meantime they are also facing a very huge competition as well.
Let’s get the example of cooking oil. My father is a farmer and has lands in Badakhshan province of Afghanistan and producing wheat, rice, vegetable, cooking oil, dry grass for animals, chicken, eggs etc. My father cultivates cooking oil called “Roghan –e- Sarsham” it means Oil of Sarsham in 5 hectares of land every year and gets more or less 7000 kg of cooking oil, which only 150 kg of oil are enough for our family annual consumption. And the rest of 6950 kgs of them are ready for sell which are sold in equal price with external cooking oil. But unfortunately, the demand graph of Sarsham cooking oil is ten times lesser than external cooking oil.
Now it is the Government’s duty to govern the Rules of Law and apply the articles of domestic preferences by putting more taxes in external cooking oil to break their competition speed in order to make ready the domestic cooking oil for sell. Whereas Sarsham cooking oil is 100% pure than external cooking oil and it is much healthy for the consumers and doesn’t have any side effects as well.
Finally our pure, healthy and domestic product of Sarsham Cooking oil is expired and thrown away because of not being purchased due to above mentioned case.
According to my last research, the majority of farmers in North East of Afghanistan is now trying to sell their own lands and properties in order to feed their family since their products are not afford their family daily expenses.
Written by: Sadaqatullah Sadiq, Feb, 13, 2013, Kabul, Afghanistan
