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From Our Own Correspondent: Hunger in Helmand

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Hunger in Helmand

29/01/2022 GMT

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Hunger in Helmand

New hurdles for Afghan farmers returning home; plus tales from Senegal, Turkey and Japan

For displaced farmers returning home, there are new challenges; Turkey's dreams of expanding its sea power; a celebrity landlord in Senegal; exorcising "hungry ghosts" in Japan

Pascale Harter introduces insights and analysis from BBC correspondents and journalists around the world.

Since the Taliban takeover last year, Afghanistan is more at peace than it’s been for a long time. It’s an opportunity for tens of thousands of the three million Afghans, who moved again and again as the fighting followed them, to finally head back to their land. But many farmers are finding it a bleak homecoming. Andrew North got a first-hand view when he travelled to Helmand province, which was for years the scene of some of the heaviest fighting between British and US forces and the Taliban.

In Turkey, many people are preoccupied at the moment by matters very close to home, like  how they will afford the family food shop. Salaries have been slashed by soaring inflation. But that doesn’t stop some Turks dreaming big about the country’s future and hoping to expand its role in the world. Tim Whewell recently went to Istanbul to hear about one man's vision to extend Turkey’s influence far and wide.

Senegal, in West Africa, has a lively and longstanding culture of democratic elections. For the past twenty years and more it’s kept to a steady schedule of local, regional and national votes, with regular and peaceful transfers of power. The latest regional elections, held last week, saw the ruling party coalition, Benno Bokk Yaakaar, lose the mayors’ offices in two big cities, the capital, Dakar, and Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region in the west of the country. It’s been seen as a sign that the popularity of President Macky Sall’s is falling, and that his government may lose the next national election.  But it’s not just the candidates in the headlines who sway the voters. Lucinda Rouse rented a place in the Senegalese capital and found herself living above the home of a community leader with considerable influence.

In October last year, Japan elected Fumio Kishida to be its Prime Minister - and as the new government got itself organised, an old story re-emerged. Mr Kishida planned to move into the official Prime Minister’s residence, in order to be closer to work. There’s nothing structurally wrong with the place, it’s a handsome Art Deco building in good repair, put up in 1929 and it comes with the job. But it had been unoccupied for more than a decade as previous Prime Ministers wouldn’t set foot there. Rupert Wingfield Hayes explains why.

(Image: A man rides his bike along a dirt road in Helmand province, November 2021. Credit: Javed Tanveer/AFP)

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