Afghanistan, I'd Like You to Meet Japan...

Tetrapods, coming soon to Afghan desserts?Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell has a good response to a New York Times story on the tremendous untapped mineral wealth of Afghanistan.  (Basically, Hounshell finds the timing of the story suspect given the current negative news cycle on Afghanistan and the fact that knowledge of Afghanistan's mineral wealth has been freely available on the Internet since 2007.)  For our Japanophiliac purposes, however, I'd like to focus on Hounshell's conclusion:

According to an article in the journal Industrial Minerals, "Afghanistan has the lowest cement production in the world at 2kg per capita; in neighbouring Pakistan it is 92kg per capita and in the UK it is 200kg per capita."Afghanistan's cement plants were built by a Czech company in the 1950s, and nobody's invested in them since the 1970s. Most of Afghanistan's cement is imported today, mainly from Pakistan and Iran. Apparently the mining ministry has been working to set up four new plants, but they are only expected to meet about half the country's cement needs.

Why do I mention this? One of the smartest uses of development resources is also one of the simplest: building concrete floors. Last year, a team of Berkeley researchers found that "replacing dirt floors with cement appears to be at least as effective for health as nutritional supplements and as helpful for brain development as early childhood development programs." And guess what concrete's made of? Hint: it's not lithium.

Well, there is apparently a concrete shortage in Afghanistan and a solid case that widespread construction of concrete floors offers the the most bang for Afghanistan's buck in terms of development; there's a well-documented concrete surplus in Japan, the U.S. government kind of owes the Japanese government one after punting on the relocation of Futenma Air Base, and Japan's exports are destined to take a hit once U.S.-China relations begin to warm again.  

I'm aware there are no beaches in Afghanistan, so the tetrapod-producing sector of the Japanese concrete pork economy won't make any dents (unless they can somehow create a line of tetrapods designed to protect the dessert from erosion.)  Japan could even send Tadao Ando to Afghanistan, to fill that country also with tasteless, hulking, concrete monoliths.