A Bumper Crop

At a seminar on drugs held recently in Nangarhar province in south-eastern Afghanistan, 55-year-old Khan Zamar, a farmer, put it in a nutshell. “All our life depends on income from poppy, it is the best cash crop. If there are alternatives, we’ll leave poppy. We accept the orders of the government, but there are problems for us.” When asked about this season’s planting he said: “I will grow whatever the people cultivate; if it is poppy, if it is wheat.”

This week, the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) was due to release figures on this year’s harvest. According to statistics issued by Drug Scope, a British charity, output for 2002 was between 1,900 and 2,700 tonnes of opium resin, a huge rise on the 185 tonnes produced during the Taliban regime’s final year in power.

In the future, the poppy problem will be a good indicator of the President’s hold over the country. At the height of their power the Taliban boasted a 94% reduction in output between their July 2000 decree banning poppy cultivation and the 2001 tiny harvest. It won them praise from the West.

With Afghan poppies accounting for around 80% of the supply of heroin in Europe, western leaders consider their reduction a priority. Under an agreement worked out by the G8 (the seven richest industrialized countries, plus Russia), efforts to improve drug control in Afghanistan are being led by Britain. It is working with both the Afghan government, which has set up a National Security Council (NSC), and the ODCCP.

Part of the NSC’s remit is to tackle the production and trafficking of heroin. But mechanisms are not yet in place at provincial level to achieve this. Even if they were, regional leaders, many of whom have benefited from heroin trafficking in the past, are likely to object to any interference.

The ODCCP aims to bring drug control into the mainstream of development assistance, focusing on law reforms, the creation of an effective police force and, most important but most difficult of all, the development of alternative sources of income for Afghanistan’s poppy farmers.

Finding money for all this is a problem. By September 2002, nearly half of the $1.8 billion committed to the reconstruction of Afghanistan for 2002 had been disbursed, and most of that had been used to pay for emergency projects such as resettling refugees, rather than reconstruction. Little was left for long-term programmes.

According to UN officials, there are obvious flaws in the existing schemes. A kilogram of opium is at today’s prices worth around $300 to a farmer, so that with an average harvest of 50kg per hectare, he can expect to bring in around $15,000 per hectare.

The disincentives to growing alternative crops are formidable. Roads and irrigation canals need rebuilding, and Afghanistan’s droughts make the cultivation of crops needing more than minimal water, such as wheat, near-impossible. Wheat is also expensive to transport and to store. Poppies require little water to grow, and the harvested resin can be kept for years before being processed for heroin. Besides, the returns for wheat, at around $60 per hectare, are minuscule compared with poppy. That is the problem that is getting worse: as refugees return to their homes, there are growing pressures on land. So Khan Zaman, still concerned about putting food on the table for his children, may look to see what his neighbours are doing, and join them in planting poppies.

(From ‘The Economist’)

 

20. Read Article 2 quickly and find answers to the following questions.

1. In which region is cannabis traditionally grown in Morocco?

2. Is cannabis production spreading to new areas?

3. How much of Morocco’s arable land is given over to cannabis?

4. How much cannabis is harvested in Morocco?

5. In what way does cannabis production threaten the environment?

6. How many people depend on cannabis crop?

7. What fact indicates that cannabis production in Morocco will hardly be abandoned?

8. What income do Moroccan farmers get from cannabis cultivation? How does it compare with the profits of drug trafficking in Europe?