Helmand Valley Authority

The Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) based in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, originally named the Helmand Valley Authority (HVA) until its expansion in 1965, was established on December 4, 1952 as an agency of the Afghan Government. The agency was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States, with a remit covering lands in Farah Province, Ghazni Province, Helmand Province, Herat Province, and Kandahar Province.

The HAVA is overseen by the Afghan (previously the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation).

The HAVA was created to manage the economic development of the Helmand and Arghandab valleys, primarily through irrigation and agricultural land development along the Helmand River and the Arghandab River, in a plan which was forecast to be of primary importance to the future economy of Afghanistan. Before the outbreak of conflict in the late 1970s the area irrigated by the HAVA produced a large proportion of Afghanistan's grain and cotton and was a major source of foreign exchange though exports. The area of agricultural land under irrigation more than halved between 1979 and 2002 to around 1,500,000 hectares (5,800 sq mi), although this has since been increased.

The project received major loans from the Export-Import Bank of the United States and, although around 20% of all Afghan Government expenditure went into funding the HVA and HAVA during the 1950s and into the 1960s, it was generally seen as a US project. It resulted, in the words of historian Arnold J. Toynbee in a piece of America inserted into the Afgan Landscape... The new world they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River's expense is to be an America-in-Asia.

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