Bulb grower Lou Cuypers is one of the few Dutch people left in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. “I’m surprised at what it’s been like here since the Dutch soldiers left.”

Lou Cuypers from Limburg in the south of the Netherlands sticks out among the Australian soldiers and Afghan locals walking around the dusty military base in Uruzgan. His wet-look blond hair is combed back, his light blue shirt nicely ironed and, under his faded jeans, he sports expensive hand-made shoes.

Saffron
Mr Cuypers gave up his ailing bulb-growing business in the Netherlands in 2005. Since 2007, he has lived and worked in one of the hundreds of armoured containers at the military base that’s still known as Camp Holland. He used Dutch subsidies to establish 100 hectares of saffron fields, offering Afghan farmers an alternative to the production of marijuana and opium poppies.

Saffron

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

He has just clinched a deal with a Dutch spice supplier for a new 60-hectare saffron farm. The expensive orange-coloured stigmas produced by the saffron crocus there should be available in Dutch supermarkets later this year.

New deals
The Dutch troops left Uruzgan in August 2010. He remained, he explains, showing us round his work place at Camp Holland, which is littered with jeeps and containers left behind by the Dutch. Even though his contract for saffron cultivation agreed with the Netherlands foreign ministry has not yet expired, the optimistic businessman has already made deals with the Americans to train farmers all over Uruzgan.

It’s harder work than it used to be though. The Australian soldiers who now run Camp Holland are rather cautious and at first wanted ‘that odd Dutchman’ expelled from the base for security reasons. In the end, however, Mr Cuypers managed to stay on. The increasing corruption is also a problem. He had to wait seven months for two containers of agricultural machinery and parts from the Netherlands. He was expected to pay thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes at both the Pakistani and the Afghan borders. Parts were stolen as well. The problems led to months of delays to his Uruzgan projects.

Dutch legacy
While riding round Uruzgan in his jeep, he often reflects on the legacy left by the Dutch. He is surprised that the area has remained relatively peaceful. Like many others, he expected all hell to break loose when the new lead nation, the United States, took over. “I thought there’d be a tougher approach,” he explains, “but, as far as I can see, it’s not gone at all bad.”

Both countries worked hard on the handover. Mr Cuypers thought it took a long time – and work in the fields was suspended while it went on. Now, it seems, it was all for the best: “They do have a different approach, but the Dutch put down foundations here.”

Peace in Afghanistan remains an extremely relative matter though. Shortly after we met, a tanker lorry exploded at the gate of the base. More or less simultaneously, another entrance to the camp came under fire. When he saw the fireball flash into the sky, Mr Cuypers raced to the parking lot where the blast had occurred. The containers he’d waited so long for are stored there. Oh no, he thought. But his containers were unharmed. In two days, the goods will be released and he can finally get to work again.

(mw/rk)