Ecological Innovation Case Study

From Minefields
to Markets

Roots of Peace rehabilitates war-contaminated agricultural land through demining and agroecological restoration — rebuilding food sovereignty for conflict-affected communities across twelve countries.

1M+
Mines cleared
Across 12 countries
62K
Families supported
Afghanistan alone
25M㎡
Land restored
Returned to production
300%
Income increase
Avg. post-programme
Component 1 · Description War–Ecology–Recovery Chain

This causal chain traces how armed conflict destroys ecological systems, collapses livelihoods, and perpetuates displacement — and where Roots of Peace intervenes to break the cycle.

💣
Armed Conflict
Bombing, mining, and chemical contamination of agricultural land
→
🌍
Ecological Collapse
Soil toxicity, land denial, biodiversity loss, water contamination
→
📉
Livelihood Collapse
Famine, displacement, poverty, aid dependency
→
🌱
Roots of Peace
Demining → soil restoration → agroecology → market linkage
→
🌾
Regeneration
Food sovereignty, community income, land dignity restored
Strategic Context

The Food Sovereignty Crisis

Minefields act as systemic barriers to regional stability and agricultural development.

  • Post-War Stagnation: Arable land remains trapped in a state of "perpetual conflict," preventing generational farming.
  • Systemic Collapse: Lack of land access erodes local food security, forcing reliance on expensive, volatile imports.
  • Sovereignty First: Demining is the fundamental prerequisite for restoring a community's right to self-sustenance.
Methodology

The Four-Phase Model

A holistic transition from contaminated soil to global retail shelves.

Phase 01

Land Clearance

Strategic demining with HALO Trust and MAG. Precision mapping defines the agricultural footprint.

Phase 02

Ecosystem Restoration

Agroecological rehabilitation. Repairing water systems and soil health to ensure long-term viability.

Phase 03

Farmer Empowerment

Knowledge transfer through cooperative structures, blending indigenous techniques with modern agroecology.

Phase 04

Market Integration

Connecting local harvests to premium global markets like Whole Foods and international retail partners.

Who It Serves
Primary communities and demographics
  • 👩‍🌾War-affected women farmers — primary beneficiaries in Afghanistan, where women are the backbone of saffron cultivation and the most economically marginalised post-conflict
  • 🏔️Indigenous highland communities in Guatemala's Western Highlands, facing structural poverty, climate vulnerability, and migration pressure
  • 🌾Smallholder farming families in post-conflict zones across Cambodia, Iraq (Nineveh), Vietnam (Quang Tri), and Croatia
  • 🚨Emerging contexts: Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine — communities where conflict is recent and agricultural land damage is severe
Who Drives It
Governance and organisational model
  • ▸US-based NGO founded 1997 by Heidi Kühn — hybrid model combining humanitarian demining, agricultural development, and social enterprise
  • ▸Functions as a catalytic intermediary — convening governments, donors (USAID, EU, FAO), demining orgs (HALO Trust, MAG), and local cooperatives
  • ▸Field level: local cooperatives and farmer associations are implementing partners
  • ▸Strategic authority remains at NGO level — creating productive tension with grassroots models of social change (explored in Critical Reflection)
Why This Is an Alternative
Departing from mainstream development logic
  • ✓Rejects food aid in favour of food sovereignty — communities produce, own, and sell their own harvest
  • ✓Ecological restoration precedes economic extraction — soil is healed before it is farmed
  • ✓Restores indigenous crops (saffron, pomegranate, date palm) rather than imposing external monocultures
  • ✓Replaces opium poppy income with saffron — 3× the economic return, none of the violence
  • ≈Remains embedded in global markets — a deliberate but contested strategic choice (see Reflection)
Core Programme · 2003–Present Global Programme Footprint

Scroll to zoom · Drag to pan · Click a programme country to explore · Click elsewhere to reset

+
−
Scroll to zoom · Drag to pan
Programme Countries
Select a highlighted country on the map to view programme details and impact data.
Core / Active Programme
Legacy Programme (completed)
Active / Emerging
Emerging / Pilot
🌍

Click on any highlighted country on the map to explore its programme details, impact metrics, and crop data.

2003–2024 Global Impact
118K+
Farmers Trained
Afghanistan CHAMP programme
$1.4B
Export Value Facilitated
Peak year 2018 — Afghanistan
1M+
Trees Planted
Vietnam legacy programme
15K
UXO/ERW Cleared
Vietnam 2010–2022
85+
Demo Plots Active
Guatemala highlands 2024
Roots of Peace: Vietnam Documentary

Transition from minefields to pepper and coffee plantations

Location: Quang Tri Province, Vietnam
Component 2 · Theoretical Connections Evaluation

Roots of Peace sits at a productive and sometimes uncomfortable intersection of several theoretical traditions. It is not a perfect embodiment of any single framework — and that tension is analytically interesting. Below, we trace how it engages with postdevelopment critique, food sovereignty, doughnut economics, diverse economies, and ecological alternatives, drawing on the course readings.

Escobar / Hickel · Postdevelopment & Decolonial Critique
Does it challenge the development apparatus?
  • ✓Refuses food-aid model that reproduces dependency — builds productive capacity instead
  • ✓Saffron-over-opium strategy is a genuinely post-dependency livelihood intervention
  • ✓Farmers own their harvest and sell at premium prices — a departure from aid logic
  • ✗Tension: US-based NGO funded largely by USAID — structurally embedded in the development apparatus Escobar critiques. Authority flows downward from San Francisco, not upward from Afghan farming communities
La Via Campesina · Food Sovereignty
Does it embody food sovereignty in practice?
  • ✓Restores indigenous crops (pomegranate, saffron, date palm, pepper) — not external monocultures
  • ✓Farmers regain control over land previously denied to them; agroecology and soil health prioritised over yield maximisation
  • ✓Strong alignment with La Via Campesina's vision of community-defined food systems
  • ≈Complication: Market integration (Afghan saffron in Whole Foods; Vietnamese pepper in Morton & Bassett) connects farmers to the global commodity chains food sovereignty critique targets — enabling without being fully sovereign
Raworth · Doughnut Economics
Operating within the safe and just space?
  • ✓Addresses the social floor directly — food, income, agency for the most marginalised post-conflict communities
  • ✓Works within ecological limits — soil restoration, agroforestry, tree-planting reduce rather than amplify ecological stress
  • ✓Does not pursue growth-at-any-cost; the war–ecology–recovery chain maps directly onto doughnut logic
  • ✓Alignment: Conflict drives communities below the social floor by destroying ecological foundations — RoP restores both simultaneously
Cameron & Gibson-Graham · Diverse Economies
Cameron & Gibson-Graham · Diverse Economies
  • ▸RoP actively builds cooperative architectures — farmer cooperatives in Cambodia and Afghanistan operate outside pure market logic
  • ▸Saffron cooperatives allow women to retain control of pricing and distribution — closer to diverse economies tradition than conventional NGO programming
  • ▸Naik (SSIR) resonance: women of the Global South have built cooperative architectures (SEWA, Amul) as tools for decolonising land — RoP's Afghan women's cooperatives echo this tradition
  • ▸Question remains: are cooperatives fully community-governed, or does NGO oversight limit their potential as genuinely diverse economic forms?
Navigating Core Tensions: Local vs. Global · Traditional vs. Modern
Local vs. Global
  • ▸Global market integration is RoP's exit strategy from aid dependency
  • ▸Communities remain rooted in local ecologies and knowledge while accessing global value chains on their own terms
  • ▸Willis (Theories and Practices of Development): this tension is central to the livelihoods debate — RoP navigates it deliberately, not accidentally
Traditional vs. Modern
  • ▸Traditional knowledge as foundation, not obstacle — saffron cultivation is millennia-old; pomegranate orchards are cultural inheritance
  • ▸Modern tools (drip irrigation, greenhouse tech, export certification) introduced as amplifiers of indigenous practice — not replacements
  • ▸Directly opposes the Green Revolution logic Harrington critiques — treating tradition as deficiency
Component 3 · Impact & Effectiveness Measurable Outcomes
Farmer Income Change
Average income index before and after programme (baseline = 100)
Programme Timeline
Key milestones in Roots of Peace history
1997
Founded — Croatia
Heidi Kühn begins work in post-Homeland War vineyards
2002
Afghanistan launch
Post-Taliban, pomegranate & saffron programme begins
2009
Vietnam programme
Ho Chi Minh Trail zones cleared; grape cultivation begins
2016
Iraq — date palms
Post-ISIS agricultural recovery in Nineveh province
2024 →
Gaza & Lebanon — emerging
Post-conflict assessment underway; scaling required urgently
Hectares Cleared by Country
Cumulative agricultural land returned to productive use (estimated, thousands of m²)
Core Programme · 2003–Present Afghanistan: Mines to Markets

CHAMP ($72M, 2010–2020) → AMP (2020–2021) → CBARD (2021–present)

$72M
CHAMP Total Value
10-year USAID programme 2010–2020
700 ha
Vineyard Trellising
Doubled output, export quality
134K MT
Exports Facilitated
Valued at ~$300M (CHAMP period)
Gulfood Export Deal Growth
Confirmed trade agreements at Gulfood Dubai (USD millions)
CBARD Crop Exports (MT)
Metric tons of CBARD-supported crops sold/exported by year
Multi-Country Portfolio Vietnam · Guatemala · Ukraine & Beyond
Vietnam · 2010–2022 · Legacy
From Bomb Craters to Pepper Vines
Transformed Quang Tri province — one of the world's most heavily bombed areas — into productive farmland. Cleared 500,000+ m² with MAG partnership; planted 1 million+ trees. Morton & Bassett now sells Roots of Peace black pepper in US supermarkets.
15,000
UXO/ERW cleared
1M+
Trees planted
4,000+
Farming households
85%
Farm success rate
Guatemala · 2021–Present · Active
Western Highlands Demonstration Plots
Addressing structural poverty and migration pressure in indigenous highland communities. High-value vegetables, coffee agroforestry, and climate-smart irrigation enabling 2–3 crop cycles/year. Yields 20%+ above national average; income up to 5× in some cases.
85
Demo plots by late 2024
500+
Beneficiaries (2023)
80,000 m²
Farmland improved
30%+
Women participants
Ukraine · 2023–Present · Emerging
Mines to Vines Initiative
Launched 2023 in collaboration with Rotary partners — applying the Afghanistan & Vietnam demining-to-agriculture model to Ukraine's heavily contaminated wheat belt. Millions of hectares at risk. EU grant proposal >€16M under development. Strategic FAO partnership being explored.
2023
Pilot year launched
€16M+
EU grant proposed
Millions
Contaminated ha
FAO
Strategic partner explored
Vietnam Impact Pyramid
Cumulative legacy outcomes 2010–2022
Guatemala — Demonstration Plots Growth
Programme scale-up from pilot to model (2021–2024)
Key Success Factors
Click each factor to expand — what makes this model work across contexts
🌱 Ecology-first sequencing ▸
Demining and soil restoration precede farming — prevents the ecological degradation trap that undermined the Green Revolution (Harrington). Land health is a prerequisite, not an afterthought.
🌿 Indigenous crop selection ▸
Saffron, pomegranate, and date palm are culturally embedded — communities already know how to grow them. Uptake is faster, and cultural resonance deepens commitment.
🤝 Farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer ▸
Trained farmers become trainers — a horizontal diffusion model that reduces dependence on external expertise and builds community capacity that survives programme exit.
📦 Full value chain integration ▸
From soil to supermarket shelf — RoP does not abandon farmers at the farm gate. Market linkage, trade fair facilitation, and branding transform subsistence into dignified commercial agriculture.
♀️ Women as primary beneficiaries ▸
In Afghanistan especially, women saffron farmers are central to programme design — not added as a gender target. This structural commitment produces deeper household-level transformation.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative: A Measurement Tension
Click each section to explore — what numbers capture and what they miss
✓ What Quantitative Metrics Capture ▸
  • ✓ Metric tons exported; farmers trained; hectares cleared; income % change
  • ✓ Donor-reportable, comparable across programmes, externally credible
  • ✓ Enables accountability and scale-decision-making
✗ What Quantitative Metrics Miss ▸
  • ✗ Restored relationship with ancestral land — the dignity of farming land your grandparents farmed
  • ✗ Women's increased decision-making power inside households
  • ✗ Ecological recovery: soil biodiversity, water retention, biodiversity return
⚖️ The Core Tension ▸
Bugg-Levine & Emerson show that measurement systems shape what organisations optimise for. If RoP's M&E only measures what donors fund, the programme will slowly drift toward donor priorities — not community priorities.
Component 4 · Scaling Strategies Pathways for Growth
Current Funding Model & Its Structural Risk
  • ▸~90% US government contracts (chiefly USAID) — structural vulnerability to foreign policy cycles
  • ▸2021 Taliban takeover: $72M CHAMP → ~$5M UNDP rebid overnight — demonstrating precarity of bilateral dependency
  • ▸Social enterprise revenue (saffron, wine, pepper retail) is the best route to autonomy — currently a small fraction of income
  • ▸Pipeline: EU Grant €16M+ (Ukraine), Rotary partnerships, UNDP — diversification underway but fragile
Primary Risk
USAID Dependency
~90%+ of revenue from US government contracts (2020–23)
Diversification Path
Social Enterprise Revenue
Product sales, EU grants, Rotary partnerships — growing but small
⚖️
Policy
International Humanitarian Law Reform
  • ▸Strengthen IHL Art. 35 enforcement to cover agricultural land and food systems
  • ▸Mandate post-conflict ecological assessment; eco-destruction as a war crime
  • ▸Donor governments must fund post-conflict land rehabilitation as part of peacebuilding commitments — not discretionary aid
💰
Funding
Diverse Revenue: Enterprise + Participatory Grants
  • ▸Scale wine/saffron/pomegranate social enterprise via impact retail partnerships
  • ▸Community-led grantmaking (Thousand Currents, participatory budgeting) to shift power to farmer cooperatives
  • ▸Multi-lateral funding (EU, FAO, UNDP) to reduce bilateral government dependency
  • ▸Impact bonds tied to measurable land rehabilitation outcomes
🌐
Replication
Gaza · Lebanon · Ukraine · Angola
  • ▸Ukraine: contaminated wheat belt — €16M EU proposal underway; Mines to Vines initiative launched 2023
  • ▸Lebanon: olive and tobacco farming communities devastated; urgent need for land rehabilitation
  • ▸Gaza: 70% agricultural land damaged; Palestinian olive groves as food sovereignty and cultural assets
  • ▸Angola: one of the world's most mine-contaminated nations; crop-specific adaptation and genuine community co-leadership required
Organisational Capacities Needed to Scale
01
Local governance transfer
Structured transition of strategic authority to local cooperatives — not just operational delivery. Requires legal frameworks for cooperative land ownership in each context.
02
Women's leadership pipelines
Formal leadership training for women cooperative leaders. Naik's analysis shows women's cooperatives sustain longer when women hold governance, not just membership roles.
03
Monitoring & qualitative evaluation
Embed participatory qualitative methods — storytelling, community-defined success indicators — to capture what numbers miss beyond MT exported and farmers trained.
Policy Barriers Currently Blocking Scale
01
WTO Agreement on Agriculture
The AoA treats smallholder price support as trade-distorting — exactly the double-standard Hickel identifies. This restricts policy tools post-conflict governments can use to support restored farmers.
02
Export certification barriers
SPS food-safety standards are designed for industrial producers. Smallholder farmers face enormous compliance costs to access the premium markets RoP's model depends on.
03
Active conflict zones
Gaza and Lebanon present a fundamental challenge: the model requires political stability. Scaling here requires unprecedented humanitarian-development coordination.
Urgent Replication Contexts (2024–2026)
Active conflict zones with immediate post-war agricultural rehabilitation needs
Component 5 · Critical Reflection Limitations & Tensions

A genuine critical assessment requires more than acknowledging that the programme has limitations. Below we identify where Roots of Peace falls short, what trade-offs are structurally embedded in its model, what unintended consequences have emerged or are latent — and what this case study taught us about development, change, and transformation.

Limitations
Governance deficit — NGO authority vs. community self-determination
  • ▸Strategic decisions originate with a US-based NGO, not farming communities
  • ▸Contradicts Ecological Swaraj's upward-flowing democratic governance ideal
  • ▸Power transferred at economic level before governance level
Rural bias — urban war ecologies are excluded
  • ▸Model addresses agricultural land only — Gaza City, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Beirut residents are excluded
  • ▸Urban food system collapse operates through destroyed markets and infrastructure — not minefields
  • ▸An urban food systems dimension has not yet been developed
Quantitative bias in impact measurement
  • ▸Success defined in MT exported, farmers trained, dollars earned — donor-friendly metrics
  • ▸Unmeasured: restored dignity, land relationship, reduced trauma, women's household decision-making power, ecological recovery trajectories
  • ▸Absence of qualitative data distorts how the programme learns
Trade-offs & Tensions
Scale vs. depth — the demonstration plot dilemma
  • ▸Guatemala: 1 → 85 plots in 3 years achieves breadth but risks shallowness
  • ▸Farmer buy-in, cooperative resilience, ecological sustainability take time to root
  • ▸Donor pressure for visible scale can undermine the slow work of genuine transformation (Bugg-Levine & Emerson)
Market integration risk — sovereignty to dependency
  • ▸Scaling the social enterprise model risks re-embedding communities into global commodity chains
  • ▸Line between dignified market participation and market dependency is not always stable
  • ▸Key question: if Whole Foods delists Afghan saffron, what is the fallback?
Autonomy vs. collaboration — the USAID paradox
  • ▸USAID funding enables scale and credibility but constrains programme design, country selection, and exit timelines
  • ▸2021 Afghan budget cut was not a programme failure — it was a political decision in Washington DC
  • ▸True community autonomy requires financial insulation from foreign policy cycles of donor governments
Potential Unintended Consequences
Critical Analysis of Programmatic Externalities
Market Price Distortion
  • ▸ Large volumes of subsidized exports could depress global prices for smallholders outside the program.
  • ▸ Development-induced competitive harm to regional producers in neighboring markets.
Gentrification of Traditional Crops
  • ▸ Repositioning staples as "luxury exports" can shift their role from subsistence to premium commodity.
  • ▸ Community foods can become economically inaccessible for the very communities that grow them.
Women's Labour Intensification
  • ▸ Increased income can intensify labor burdens without a redistribution of domestic responsibilities.
  • ▸ Naik (SSIR): Economic empowerment without structural role change may increase workload without increasing power.
Kothari et al. — Alternatives to Development: Assessment
Parameter Kothari et al. — Ideal Roots of Peace Assessment
Political Governance Community-centred direct democracy; power flows upward from ground Partially met. NGO-led strategy; local cooperatives form governance base but strategic authority remains external. Productive tension with Ecological Swaraj ideal.
Economic Framework Community-owned; holistic well-being; localized self-reliance for basic needs Farmers own produce, income, and land access. Model explicitly rejects aid dependency in favour of market self-reliance built from agroecological base.
Social Justice & Equity Radical redistribution of power; empowerment of the weak to control their lives War-affected women farmers are primary beneficiaries. Productive capacity — not just welfare — is transferred. Agency, not charity, is the mechanism.
Knowledge & Culture Equal status to diverse knowledge systems; knowledge in public domain; cultural diversity respected Crop selection draws on pre-war indigenous agricultural knowledge in each context. No universal Western model imposed. Farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer prioritised.
Human–Nature Life-centred; intrinsic value of non-human nature; nature as commons Land is healed as a living system before being made productive. Restorative framing is central, not incidental. Directly opposes extractive reconstruction.
Ecological Stability Non-negotiable bedrock; absolute limits accepted; precautionary principle applied Agroecological methods throughout. Soil remediation precedes production. No industrial monoculture scaling. Ecological integrity is a prerequisite, not an add-on.
What We Learned
Key Takeaways from the Roots of Peace Case Study
  • ▸ Hybridity Over Purity: RoP demolished the clean binary between "mainstream" and "alternative" development — it is a genuine hybrid using institutional power for transformative ends.
  • ▸ Contextual Ethics: In active crises, the standard isn't "is this perfectly alternative?" but "does this restore dignity and land?" Safety is the prerequisite for sovereignty.
  • ▸ Escobar’s Challenge: The call to reject development entirely must be weighed against immediate community needs — RoP’s record on land restoration offers a compelling middle path.
  • ▸ Structural Barriers: Hickel and WTO rules highlight that local innovation has limits; true change requires shifting the global architecture that disadvantages smallholders.
  • ▸ Governance vs. Participation: Following Naik’s distinction, RoP must ensure women are leaders, not just beneficiaries. Empowerment requires a shift from participation to governance.
  • ▸ The Metrics Drift: Measurement systems shape organizational priorities. If M&E only tracks donor metrics, the mission will inevitably drift away from community-led priorities.