BOISE, June 30: To help poor Afghani villagers make money on potatoes instead of opium poppies, Idaho farmer Pat Rowe used a little old technology: root cellars.

Rowe, 68, whose family raises tubers and wheat on 2,000 acres near American Falls, Idaho, went to the Central Asian country with a root cellar design common across his home state’s famous potato country in the 1930s and 1940s. As part of his work in Bamiyan, located about 100 miles west of Kabul, Rowe said it was important that his potato sheds not be too sophisticated. They had to be built with materials readily available.

Before leaving, he took notes from neighbours on Idaho’s Snake River plain who had a root cellar on their property. “You look at what people are using and see what they are doing,” Rowe said Monday, of his trip. “You don’t want to be a crazy foreigner with all these ideas. You’ve got to be practical with the application.”

Rowe went to Afghanistan as part of a $6.4 million US Department of Agriculture programme meant to fill gaps in Afghanistan’s food supply chain and develop agriculture to compete with the forbidden poppies that fuel the country’s heroin trade.

Rowe’s work in January 2006 won mention earlier this month by first lady Laura Bush. She brought up Rowe’s root cellars in a speech in France on June 12.

“Afghan potato farmers in Bamiyan have learned storage methods from an Idaho potato farmer that are making their crops more profitable,” said Bush, who had made an unannounced trip to Bamiyan four days earlier.

Paul Sippola, a programme officer for the Washington, DC-based nonprofit development outfit CNFA, which ran the Department of Agriculture aid programme, said Rowe’s retro cellar design was used in about 50 potato storage sheds in Afghanistan.

It’s now being replicated with a few modifications to suit local needs in Pakistan’s Kashmir region, where seed potato farmers’ livelihoods were devastated by the 2005 earthquake. “It’s essentially the same one that Pat developed,” he said in a phone interview. “Pat’s work, which started in Afghanistan, has really grown.”

Rowe is a veteran of nearly 30 US government-sponsored trips to developing countries, including Egypt, China and Zimbabwe to help promote new agricultural techniques.

Farmers in Bamiyan, an ancient village on the Silk Road that spent 1,500 years in the shadow of two huge Buddha statues before they were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, had no efficient way to store potatoes following their harvest, leading to drastic food-price increases and shortages.

“When the harvest is on, there’s a glut,” Rowe said. “If you had enough of those sheds built, it would make more food available to people at a reasonable price.”