KABUL, Feb 23: More than a week of heavy rain and snow in Afghanistan have broken recent records in many areas of the parched country, UN experts said, though stopping short of declaring a four-year drought over.

United Nations spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said downpours this year in south Afghanistan, which has been reduced to dustbowl in the last five years, have so far exceeded rain for all of 2002.

“Last year there was 42.19 mm in the south, in January and February this year there has already been 76.61 mm — an increase of 80 per cent,” he said.

But Rabah Lekhal, an agro-meteorologist with the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), said statistics warranted further study to determine whether the country’s devastating dry spell was over.

“It is not a dry year, but we cannot say the drought is finished,” he told reporters in Kabul.

Already wizened by 23 years of warfare, lack of rain has reduced much of Afghanistan’s fertile farmland to arid desert, displacing thousands of people and keeping the country on the brink of crisis.

Wide waterways have turned to trickles, reservoirs and lakes to stagnant pools and once bountiful orchards have withered into petrified relics of their former selves. Although several deaths have been reported from deluges in the south, the rain and snow have brought optimism to many areas with increased river levels expected when snow, more than a metre deep in places, starts to melt.—AFP