{"book":"adl0957","page":362,"text":"297\n\nThe Prime Minister further said, \"Afghanistan's social and geographical conditions demand the economic developments to be sought more through the expansion of agricultural products and its relevant elements The main reasons to support this suggestion are :—\n\n(a) Afghanistan though a mountainous country possesses extensive fertile pieces of land, the irrigation of which is possible by utilizing river waters and control of seasonal floods.\n\n(b) The majority of the population are farmers and have great interest and experience in agriculture.\n\n(c) Industrialization needs large capital and a high standard of technology, which at present are not available. Moreover competition in this field is very keen in foreign markets.\n\n(d) Manpower in our country, from the economic point of view, is a natural source of income. At the same time it is cheap and abundant. Utilization of this natural wealth is important from every point. Industries which need more outlay can employ a limited number of people, while in agriculture more people can be employed at a comparatively low cost.\n\nThese causes as well as several social, technological, economic and financial needs of the country demand that at present it is advisable to utilize fully our natural resources and manpower proportionate to their intelligence and aptitude for the economic development of the country. It is for this reason that agriculture and cattle breeding have been given first place and high priority in this economic plan. We intend to irrigate our virgin and arable lands and to increase water supply for","chars":1581,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00362.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/362","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/362","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}