We're actually looking at several hundred million people displaced over the next 30 years. I have those specific numbers in terms of our analysis with the climate extremes that are continuing to take place on a much more routine basis than they were before.
I've explained to some of my friends who have questions about the climate changing. They said that the average temperature and average rainfall didn't change in that country. I said that the average rainfall didn't change and the average temperature didn't change, but let us look at it by season. By season it did change. The average rainfall was quite different that season and the average drought was quite different that season. In certain countries it still averaged out the same. In other countries it doesn't average out.
We push several things with donor countries. One, whether it's a humanitarian dollar or a development dollar, give us the flexibility to come in and rehabilitate land to help people survive. Last year, beneficiaries rehabilitated over half a million acres of land. That means they can survive. It's really that simple.
Give us the tools and the flexibility to not just provide cash, not just to provide a commodity but also allow the people with that same dollar to leverage that dollar so they can become more food secure, more resilient and more sustainable.
The other thing—and this is a decision that's particularly going to be difficult in the next year or two—is that there's not enough money for everything right now. I think you're going to have to prioritize. Quite frankly, I'm not saying this because I'm at the World Food Programme, but food security is fundamental to every family and nation on earth.
Development dollars—we don't get a lot of development dollars. No one impacts development on food security more than we do. So, we have to get the development dollars, because we are, in my opinion.... We can scale up and I say develop, but we're not building buildings and things like that. We're talking about water systems, irrigation systems, holding ponds, reservoirs and these types of simple building blocks, but they stabilize communities where water is an issue.
Let me give you an example of something we just did in Afghanistan. In the Mazar-e Sharif area, we would historically just bring in commodities. Well, okay, great; we were keeping people alive, but were we going to do that for 50 years? So, we went to the other side and asked our donor to give us flexibility and give us the cash. We went and met with the farmers in the stable area of Afghanistan and said we would buy from them, but we needed this quality and this quantity. Well, guess what happened. They hired more workers and bought more trucks and more equipment. Then, the milling operations needed to buy more equipment, buy more trucks and hire more people. It was the same dollar. Then, we bought it from them and took that commodity over to Mazar-e Sharif where, in the valley, they have droughts and flooding from the mountains. If they have a good crop it gets wiped out by the flood or the drought.
We met with the leaders and said we would provide this food to them with these conditions. Let's rehabilitate the mountainside. We began re-landscaping the foothills, and water was diverted into holding ponds and reservoirs with diversionary canals and small dams. The water was diverted such that, when a flash flood came, it didn't wipe out the crops in the valley. Then, when there was a drought—guess what—we had irrigation lines coming from the holding ponds.
I had this tribal leader stand there and proudly say that their children are no longer leaving; their children are no longer joining the Taliban or the anti-government rebel forces. They proudly are showing their friends from other tribal areas what it means to be in a beautiful land again. It was a remarkable success story.
We're no longer needed there, or we can now move on and do something else. This is what we want to do more of, because it really dramatically dynamically changes the fate of an area.