Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for your testimony before the committee. The purpose of our being here is to learn from your experiences and see if we can get a more comprehensive approach to what is a very complex situation.
Ms. Jones, I appreciate and applaud you for your work on micro-finance. You may or may not know that this committee was actually in Stockholm across the street from where they announced Muhammad Yunus' Nobel Peace Prize award. I hope you're giving good solid feedback around the successes of your micro-finance projects, because you may know that CIDA's reduced its commitment to micro-finance over the last five years. In the House today I urged the minister to use the occasion of the Global Microcredit Summit to reverse that.
I want to pursue this a little bit further. I think the main message you've brought to us is that we should be building on strength, and that means working with civil society to do that and--I don't want to put words in your mouth--sort of fan out from there to increase the security more broadly. You may have seen I was scrambling through my papers looking for a map, because you mentioned the province you were in but I can't visualize it. It's in the Kabul area, I assume.
I wonder if you're aware of the project of Future Generations, which actually is the Honourable Flora MacDonald's passion at the moment. She's chair of the board of Future Generations, which has a number of projects in Afghanistan. The approach to poppy crop eradication is the exact reverse of what's happening in Kandahar, with what seems to be spectacular results. In other words, to state the obvious, you don't have people starve by removing the only economic support they have through poppy crops, you work on building the alternatives.
The leadership of the community in, I think, three different provinces where Future Generations is involved is literally engaging the whole population in the poppy crop removal by announcing when they're going out to remove the crops, with the full sanctioning of the community. Therefore, you're not creating the economic chaos and starvation in people's lives that results in their crossing over to the Taliban, who understandably exploit that.
I wonder if I might ask you to briefly speak about that. And perhaps I could add a quick question to Mr. Paris.
Mr. Paris, you talked about the problem of corruption—and this is something this committee has been trying to do its homework on—in frail, fragile, and failing states. One of the things we've been told about the increasing support the Taliban has been building, along with the obvious problems that are feeding into that, is that the Taliban are paying civilians twice the rate of what the local police are being paid. So as people are losing their economic livelihoods, they're increasingly available to be recruited by the Taliban. I wonder if you could comment on any knowledge you have of that and recommendations that flow from it.
Ms. Jones, I think you could go ahead.