Kandahar's pomegranates, grapes and the dried-fruit trade

At a glance

• Kandahar's fruit grows in the Arghandab oasis. The main pomegranate is the Kandahari, grapes are dried into raisins in shaded drying houses (kishmish khana), and the province also sends out figs, almonds and other dried fruit. [5, 8, 12, 15]

• The fruit has gone to India for centuries. Elphinstone, whose mission visited the kingdom in 1808 and 1809, listed raisins, kishmish and coarse grapes among its exports to India and said pomegranates were the one fresh fruit that survived the journey. [4]

• In 2025 Kandahar's chamber of commerce counted about 23,000 tonnes of pomegranates exported. Pakistan closed the Chaman crossing soon after the season opened, and exporters sent fruit to India, Central Asia, the Gulf and Russia instead. [16]

• By the 2025 to 2026 season the same chamber put the province's fruit exports at about $429 million, a little over half of it dried fruit by weight. [17]

• In 2026 growers and traders say the closed routes through Pakistan have left their grapes and pomegranates unsold at falling prices. [22, 23]

The oasis orchards

Kandahar's fruit grows along the Arghandab river and the canals and underground channels (karez) cut from it. The oasis is semi-arid and depends on that water. An account of the valley from the autumn of 1880, printed in the Gazetteer of Afghanistan, describes an almost unbroken belt of villages, orchards, vineyards and fields along the river, and says the orchards beside the great Patab canal produced pomegranates, figs, almonds, apricots, quinces and many kinds of grapes. [5]

In H. G. Raverty's Pashto dictionary (second edition, 1867), compiled by a British officer, a pomegranate is anár (انار), a grape is angúr (انګور) and a mulberry is tút (توت). [6]

The Kandahari pomegranate

A paper on the pomegranate industry in Acta Horticulturae (2011) counts 48 leading cultivars in Afghanistan and says the main one in Kandahar province is the Kandahari, grown between 550 and 1,000 metres; the Bedana belongs to Nangarhar, at 1,000 metres and above. It puts yields between about 8,600 kilograms a hectare in Dand and more than 19,000 in Arghandab. [8] The British writer H. W. Bellew, whose account of farming round Kandahar the Gazetteer quotes, listed six sorts in the orchards: Panjwi, bam, bedona, habshi, khulchi and gunar. The Panjwi, he said, was of great size and excellent flavour, and was exported. The dried rinds of every sort were also exported, for tanners and dyers. [5]

Mountstuart Elphinstone, whose account of the kingdom first appeared in 1815, wrote that fruit going to India was either dried or picked before it was ripe and packed in cotton in wooden boxes, and then: "Pomegranates require no packing, and no other fruit will stand the journey; even these lose most of their flavour." [4] The academic paper describes the chain as a grower, a pre-harvest contractor, a Pakistani importer who finances the trade and a packing company, with baskets woven from pomegranate branches and wooden crates for export. [8]

The 2025 season shows how the trade runs now. Abdul Baqi Bina of the Kandahar chamber of commerce told Pajhwok in December 2025 that nearly 23,000 tonnes, worth about $10.56 million, had gone out. Before the Spin Boldak to Chaman crossing closed, large amounts went to Pakistan; afterwards they went to India, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and Russia. A man of fruit (4.5 kilograms) was selling for 200 to 250 afghanis in the city. [16]

Ten months later the picture was worse for growers. Afghanistan International's Pashto service reported on 27 October 2026 that a man of Kandahar pomegranates (5 kilograms) had fallen from about 500 afghanis to 300. A trader told it that only about a tenth of this year's crop had gone abroad. The provincial agriculture department, run by the Taliban, expects about 220,000 tonnes this year against 275,000 estimated for 2025, and some Arghistan orchards are drying out in the drought. [23] Older academic estimates are far lower (the Acta Horticulturae paper gives about 10,000 tonnes for the province), and the published figures cannot be reconciled. The man's weight also differs between the two reports.

Another trader, Haji Nazar Muhammad, who used to send Kandahar pomegranates to Pakistan, told the paper he had rented orchards the year before, that all the fruit stayed at home and he lost heavily, and that this year he rented none. [23] A fruit trader named Shafaatullah said, in Pashto:

هېڅکله مې دا فکر نه کاوه چې د کندهار دا خوندور انار به یوه ورځ د خاورو په بیه خرڅېږي

Hech-kala me da fikr na kawa chi da Kandahar da khwandawar anar ba yawa wradz da khawro pa bya khrazegi

I never thought this tasty Kandahar pomegranate would one day be sold at the price of dirt. [23]

Kandahar's poets mark the blossom each year with a gathering, the Anar Gul (انار ګل), "pomegranate flower". In June 2012 Pajhwok reported one at the shrine of Baba Wali in Arghandab, running from six in the evening until three in the morning, with the poet Abdul Bari Jahani as chief guest. The governor said Arghandab had once been the place where Kandahar's people went for entertainment. [26] Under the Taliban government the Kandahar information and culture department holds the festival, and at one gathering the ministry's deputy minister denied reports that poetry meetings had been banned. [27] Afghanistan International's sources said that the gathering of May 2025 was closed to the press, that poems had to be approved beforehand by committees, and that only verses praising the flower or the Taliban were read. [28] The same service described the gathering of May 2026 as built around obedience to the Taliban leader, and quoted an information ministry official telling the poets they were obliged to write verse in defence of the Islamic system. [29]

Grapes and the kishmish khana

The Gazetteer, in the same passage, counts twenty varieties of grape at Kandahar. Vines were trained most often on earth ridges eight or ten feet high, with the plants in the trenches between. Two sorts, Hasaini and Shekh Kala in the Gazetteer's spelling, were packed ripe in cotton and sent away fresh. One gave the abjosh or doghi raisin, a large golden raisin. The rest were dried in the shade into the ordinary raisin, "largely exported". [5]

Shade drying has its own building, the kishmish khana (raisin house). Pajhwok describes grapes after harvest dried in shaded, ventilated houses of this name before being sold and exported. [12] AFP, in a report from Dhi Sabz near Kabul in December 2017, pictured a farmer in the squat mud-brick shed where his family had dried grapes for generations, and described new brick houses with cement floors and metal hanging racks, where the grapes drape down like vines, replacing such sheds. [11] That report is about the Kabul side, but the building is the same. Kandahar's raisins are graded by colour. Pajhwok in 2014 called green the most preferred, with red and black sold at their own prices. [12]

The scale is large. In September 2025 the province's agriculture department put the grape harvest at 205,000 tonnes from more than 20,000 hectares of orchards in Arghandab, Daman, Dand, Shawalikot, Khakrez, Panjwai, Zherai, Maroof and Miyanshin, with about half expected to be dried. Raisin traders quoted 200 to 250 afghanis a kilogram at the start of the season and complained that they had no export route. [14] In 2022 the chamber had said 29,000 tonnes of raisins worth $96 million went out in the previous solar year. [13] In 2022 abjosh exports from Kandahar fell by 25 per cent after drought and floods cut the grape yield, by almost half according to the head of the Kandahar dried-fruit merchants' union. [30]

Figs, almonds, apricots and mulberries

Bellew wrote that Kandahar was celebrated for its fruits, especially the apricot, pomegranate, quince and fig. The large black makha fig went dry to India, and a small white fig was eaten at home. Quinces were sliced and dried for winter and their seeds sold for sherbets, and mulberries of several sorts were sometimes dried for the cold months. [5] The Gazetteer's 1880 account names almonds among the orchard crops, but gives no volume. [5]

Dried fruit from the whole country now passes through Kandahar. In November 2025 Pajhwok reported that fifteen kinds, among them figs, raisins, abjosh, sugar para and almonds, are gathered from Balkh, Takhar, Herat, Ghazni, Faryab, Jawzjan and Kandahar, packed at the Pashurandam market in Kandahar and sent to India, Pakistan and some European countries. The ministry expected about 5,000 tonnes of dried fruit to leave Kandahar that year. [15] The chamber's figure for the whole 2025 to 2026 season is larger: 182,381 tonnes of fruit worth $428.86 million, of which 101,385 tonnes were dried and 80,996 tonnes fresh, sent to India, Qatar, Russia, China and Central Asia. [17] The reports do not explain why the two totals differ so much.

Fruit on the road to India

Babur, writing about 1504, called Kabul and Kandahar the two trade-marts on the land route between Hindustan and Khurasan. [1] Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's minister, wrote in the Ain-i-Akbari that the emperor held fruit to be one of the greatest gifts of the Creator and that "ever since the conquest of Kabul, Qandahar, and Kashmir, loads of fruit are imported". [2] His entry for the Qandahar district says: "Flowers and fruits are in abundance." [3]

Elphinstone's list of the kingdom's exports to India included almonds, pistachios, walnuts, hazel nuts and fruit: dried plums and apricots, raisins and kishmish, and, fresh, apples, pears and coarse grapes. He thought the trade with Hindustan the largest of all, though it had declined. [4] The Indian trade that came by sea landed at Karachi and went on by Shikarpur to Kandahar. [4] The Lumsden mission of 1857 found Lohani Pashtun caravans bringing goods to Kandahar from Bombay and Karachi, and listed among the city's exports large amounts of dried fruit, above all grapes and apricots, besides 2,000 to 3,000 horses a year. [9] The Gazetteer lists preserved fruits, quince seeds and pomegranate rinds among what the Hindu merchants of Kandahar sent to India. [5]

Hanifi writes that through the first three quarters of the twentieth century Kandahar produced growing amounts of wool and fruit, pomegranates, apricots, figs and grapes, for home use and for export to South Asia. [7] The Pashtun Corporation of Kandahar (Shirkat-e Pashtun-e Qandahar), one of about forty companies founded in Afghanistan from 1931, took on the export of Kandahar's fruit. Hanifi gives it a capital of 1.6 million afghanis in 1935 and lists its aims: machinery for canning fresh fruit, for making the tins and boxes, for processing dried fruit, and a plant for packing to international standards. [7] Kandahar remained, in De Planhol's words, a "pre-industrial" city, with seasonal plants that bottled fruit, made jam and juice and dried raisins. [9]

The border and the price

The road east runs through Spin Boldak and Chaman, on the Durand Line, and then to Quetta. In 2021, two months after the Taliban took Kabul, AFP reported that 40,000 to 50,000 tonnes of pomegranates usually crossed it each year for Pakistan, India and the Gulf, but that only 4,490 tonnes had gone, according to the Kandahar chamber's Abdul Baqi Bina, and that 15,000 farm workers had been laid off, according to Haji Nani Agha, head of the Fresh Fruits Union in Kandahar. [18] In November 2023 a Quetta fruit seller, Syed Ahmed, was waiting for 30 tonnes of Kandhari anaar ordered from Arghandab and stuck at Spin Boldak, and Hajji Nanai, a grower of fifty years, counted more than 400 loaded trucks held there. A former president of the Chaman chamber of commerce said Pakistan had imported the fruit worth more than Rs500 million through Chaman the winter before. A customer from Mastung, buying one as a gift, told Arab News: "we can't spend the pomegranate season without eating them". [19]

The 2025 closure followed fighting along the border on 11 October 2025, after which Pakistan closed Torkham and Chaman. Islamabad says the Afghan government fails to act against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and other armed groups; Kabul denies the charge. In Chaman a dry-fruit shopkeeper said about 60 per cent of his stock, almonds, raisins, cashews and walnuts among it, came from across the border, and that two million people in Chaman and Spin Boldak depended on the crossing. [20] Kandahar exporters told Pajhwok that Pakistan closes the gates in harvest season and that they would rather use other routes, even at lower profit. [16]

The other road, through Attari and Wagah into India, was closed in 2025 after tensions between India and Pakistan over the killing of tourists in Kashmir. Dried-fruit exporters told Hasht-e Subh that their exports to India fell by about 60 per cent, and that the Iranian port of Chabahar and air freight were slower and dearer. [21] Kandahar's chamber said in September 2025 that it was trying to send raisins through Iran. [14]

In August 2026 the Associated Press reported that the five southern provinces had exported 44,225 tonnes of grapes in 2025, about 43,000 of them to Pakistan, against 256 tonnes, worth $100,000, so far in 2026. A seven-kilogram batch of raisins that sold for 1,000 to 1,200 afghanis was fetching 400 to 450, and one orchard's workforce had fallen from about 1,500 to 15. [22] Pomegranate growers in Arghandab say the same. One told Afghanistan International that if prices stay this low he will cut his trees down and plant wheat. [23]

Fruit for guests

In 2016 Dawn reported that in most of the tribal belt it is customary to serve guests dry fruit and green tea (sheen chai) before and after the meal on festive occasions, especially Eid; elders believed both help digest red meat. Zarrak Jan Mohmand said guests were served this in ordinary life too, and that some families managed it on very little. Prices had risen so far, almonds at Rs1,500 and pistachios at Rs1,200 a kilogram, that many offered only tea. A dealer said most of it had come from Afghanistan. [24] The custom belongs with *melmastia*, the duty to feed a guest, and it sits beside the meat and bread described in the article on food and hospitality.

With the tea comes nuql (noql in Iranica's spelling): almonds, pistachios or chickpeas coated in sugar. Helen Saberi, who lived in Afghanistan, calls the sugared almond (noql-e badami) the most popular. [10] AFP found Kabul shoppers in 2016 buying almonds, pistachios and raisins by the kilogram for Eid. A civil servant said it would be unthinkable not to offer visitors plates of fruit and sweets with tea, even with grapes at double the price: "Like it or not this is Eid, this is the tradition and you can not ignore it." [25] A woman in Takhar told Salam Watandar in 2026 that raisins, chickpeas, almonds and pistachios go on the Eid table with fresh fruit. [31]

Kandahar's chamber of commerce has asked wedding halls and other hosts to buy Afghan pomegranates and local fruit instead of imported fruit, so that the money reaches the growers. [16]