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The ironies of Afghan opium
production
By Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
Driven by
war, poverty and chaos, Afghanistan's opium production
in the wake of the ouster of the Taliban regime at the
end of 2001 is increasing dramatically, and seems to be
the only avenue by which many Afghanis can make a
living. Indeed, in a country already 
characterized by a tortured landscape and harsh
climatic conditions, let alone generations of war, the
commercial production of opium has been the only means
of subsistence available for many peasants in eastern
Afghanistan.
Consecutive years of drought have
made matters worse. The Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) recently asserted that since 1978,
when the country was on the verge of attaining food
self-sufficiency, irrigated surfaces have been cut in
half. Arable land, which before the war corresponded to
only 12 percent of the country's total area, fell by
another 37 percent during the 1990s. Furthermore,
Afghanistan certainly holds an unfortunate record as the
world's most-mined country. The United Nations estimates
that some 700 square kilometers are contaminated by
various unexploded ordnance which, according to the
World Bank, take a toll of some 500 victims a month,
making any return to the agricultural fields
particularly dangerous.
Continuing war has also
contributed to the prolonged lack of water for
agriculture, destroying traditional irrigation channels
and displacing significant segments of the population.
Afghanistan's renowned orchards and the vineyards of the
Shomali Plan have virtually vanished.
As a
result, of the food crops now produced in Afghanistan,
wheat, the least water-demanding, is the most favored.
But the FAO estimates that, in a country where food
shortages are persistent and where the threat of famine
is recurrent, wheat acreage has decreased by 10 percent
since the fall of the Taliban in the face of profit from
the opium poppy.
Under such conditions, the
World Bank estimates that 7 million people, a third of
the population, suffered from hunger in 2001, partly
because of the drought that prevailed in 2000 and 2001
and threatened the re-establishment of the cereal
production that the Taliban regime brought back between
1996 and 1999. By 1998, cereal production had been
restored to pre-war levels and livestock were increasing
again. By the 2000-2001 drought, however, cereal
production had declined by 50 percent and almost 60
percent of the cattle had disappeared. However, in 2002,
and owing to less difficult climatic conditions,
Afghanistan produced some 3.6 million tonnes of wheat,
82 percent more than in 2001 but still 4 percent less
than in 2000.
As for the opium harvest, it once
again literally exploded, increasing by 1,400 percent
between 2001 and 2002.
Recent price trends
for Afghan opium
The July 2000 edict of Mullah
Omar, the ousted supreme head of the Taliban and
"Commander of the Faithful", proscribed opium poppy
cultivation and forced the 2001 harvest to 185 tonnes,
an all-time low. That figure was all the more impressive
since the country had broken a world record in 1999 when
it produced 4,600 tonnes, followed by a huge 3,300
tonnes in 2000.
The farm-gate price before the
edict averaged US$30 per kilogram of fresh Afghan opium
(as opposed to dry opium, which is lighter). In March
2001, during the purchasing season for
recently-collected opium, the average farm-gate price
suddenly reached $700, reflecting the shortage
engineered by the Taliban. After September 11,
traffickers and local traders, rightly fearing American
reprisals against both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda, accelerated the sale of the 2,900 tonnes of
opium that the UN then estimated to be stored in the
north of the country.
Right after September 11,
a kilogram of Afghan opium brought only $95 to $120, far
below the price caused by the Taliban-driven shortages.
However, just before American military intervention
materialized in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the
price skyrocketed, reaching $500 per kilogram. Following
the Enduring Freedom operation and its air strikes,
opium lost some 40 percent of its farm-gate value, an
indication of the sensitivity of opium to market
contingencies. Later, in 2002, and despite a new
increase in Afghan production, with the harvest
estimated at 3,400 tonnes, prices reached $600 per
kilogram, something that the UN, which estimates
production and records price fluctuations, has been
unable to explain.
Opium production and
politico-territorial evolution
The Afghan
geopolitical scene is highly complex, and even more so
when it comes to illicit drugs. To grasp illicit
production and trade, one has to take into consideration
the role that the Taliban played in condoning the opium
economy by taxing both harvest and trade. This taxation
was actually severely denounced in the 1999
International Narcotics Control Board report. However,
such taxation was in accordance with Islamic principles
known as zakat and usher which have indeed
been acknowledged by the Taliban authorities themselves.
In 1997, the assistant director of the Pashtani
Tjarati Bank, the Taliban's central bank in their
Kandahar stronghold, was quoted as saying that "a
landowner must pay 10 percent of whatever amount he
makes on his crops". Opium merchants also had to pay a
2.5 percent tax to the Taliban, as they, like any other
producers, did to other rulers and regimes. These taxes
are well known and are Islamic practices that predate
the Taliban. Zakat, or purification, is the third
pillar of Islam and, as a tax levied on most assets,
concerns every Muslim. Once levied it is redistributed
to the poor, the rulers and the holy fighters of the
jihad. Usher, or tithe, is another Islamic tax
that is collected on raw agricultural products. Half
goes to the poor, with the other half split between the
local mullahs and the rulers, at that time the Taliban.
Thus, by levying these taxes, the Taliban were
doing nothing more than profiting on an economic system
of production established prior to their arrival on the
Afghan political scene. It is easy to see how the
Taliban, then the rulers of about 85 percent of the
country and controlling up to 96 percent of its poppy
fields, benefited from these taxes, which are inherent
to the Islamic law, or Sharia, that they enforced.
To better understand the political economy of
the opium poppy in Afghanistan, it is also essential to
mention the role in the opium economy that was then held
by the United Front (or Northern Alliance) led by the
late Ahmed Shah Masoud, assassinated on September 7,
2001 in his Panjsher Valley stronghold. It has been
reported that the United Front was also levying taxes on
opium, which would make sense considering that its own
considerable war effort required significant funding.
The United Front outlawed poppy cultivation and
heroin manufacture in June 1999, a year before the
Taliban issued their own ban. However, the United Front
clearly failed to enforce the ban in their areas, while
the Taliban impressively and unexpectedly succeeded.
Indeed, according to the UN Drug Control Program
(UNDCP), up to 150 tonnes of opium were most likely
collected in 2001 in the areas controlled by the United
Front.
These areas, being close to Tajikistan,
then served, and still do, as an extremely convenient
springboard to export opiates to Central Asia and
Russia. In fact, in the United Front-held Badakhshan in
northeastern Afghanistan, poppy-sown surfaces were
estimated to have multiplied by 2.5 times between 2000
and 2001, leading to the bountiful 2001 harvest.
That same year, only 35 tonnes of opium were
estimated to have been collected in Taliban-held areas.
In one year, Mullah Omar's edict cut production
spectacularly, from 3,300 tonnes in 2000. The Taliban
nearly rooted out opium production in the areas under
their control, in contrast to the United Front-held
areas.
But the determination shown by the
Taliban in 2000 to drastically reduce opium production
did not seem to last long since as of the beginning of
September 2001 - and before the September 11 attacks -
the Taliban most likely authorized Afghan peasants to
sow opium poppies again. Or, at the very least, they
were thought not to have reissued their prohibition,
thus leaving the peasants one precious month to obtain
the indispensable seeds before the October sowing
season.
But, on November 13, 2001, the Taliban
fled from the capital and Kabul finally awoke under the
control of the United Front troops. The Taliban
nevertheless held the southern town of Kandahar until
they negotiated their surrender with the US on December
6, 2001, one day after the Bonn agreements were signed
and the creation of a transitory Afghan government was
decided, empowering the royalist Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun
of the Popalzai tribe.
On January 17, 2002, the
Afghan transition government declared in turn that poppy
cultivation as well as the sale and consumption of opium
were altogether prohibited in Afghanistan, although the
poppies sown in the late fall of 2001 were about to
bloom and, according to the UNDCP, had the potential to
produce 1,900 to 2,700 tonnes of opium.
This, of
course, deeply upset those of the Afghan peasants who
had traditionally borrowed important sums or benefited
from advances against takings in order to be able to
feed themselves and their families until the harvest
season. In Afghanistan, this credit system is also
frequently resorted to so as to obtain the required
opium poppy seeds. It is in this sensitive context that,
on April 3, 2002, the temporary government launched its
eradication program and offered $250 in compensation for
each planted and eradicated jirib ($1,250 per
hectare).
However, the poppy growers declared
that they could obtain from $1,700 to $3,500 per
jirib if they collected their opium and sold it
at market prices. The dispute between the government and
the peasants caused some disorder, and even led to armed
confrontations. In April 2002, one such clash killed
eight peasants and wounded 35 others in the Kajaki
district of Helmand province.
Despite these
incidents, and others, including the destruction of
tractors used for eradication by mines in Helmand
province, the UNDCP then estimated that 16,500 hectares
of poppies, a third of the total surface planted in
2001-2002, had been destroyed within the framework of
the eradication program engaged by the transitory
government (mainly in the provinces of Helmand, Oruzgan,
Nangarhar and Kunar).
The Afghan government also
estimated that its eradication campaign had affected
more than one third of the cultivated areas, even though
many observers argued that, for various reasons, only 10
percent had really been eradicated. In fact it seemed
that in many cases financial compensation was pocketed
by local commanders and governors without ever reaching
the peasants. In other instances, peasants were
compensated after having only partially eradicated their
opium poppy fields.
Peasants or their local
governors reportedly resorted to various other
subterfuges to profit from both governmental
compensation and the sale of opium on the market. That
is actually all the more plausible when one considers
that the UNDCP then forecast that the Afghan peasants
engaged in the opium poppy economy would fetch
approximately $1.2 billion at the farm-gate price for
their forthcoming 2002 harvest, a huge sum not easily
turned down in a country as poor as Afghanistan.
The final UNDCP estimates came in October 2002.
Although the majority of observers, including the UNDCP,
expected production of 2,500 tonnes, Afghanistan
produced far more, perhaps as much as 3,400 tonnes. A M
Costa, general manager of the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime (ODC, of which the UNDCP is part),
defends the UN actions, saying the 2002 harvest was
lower than that in 1999, which was carried out under the
Taliban. The transition government of Hamid Karzai could
thus not be held responsible for this increase since the
last sowing had taken place before its empowerment and
in the context of the Taliban's fall, a rather chaotic
period.
However, even if the yields suddenly
increased from 24 kg/ha to 46 kg/ha (partly because the
poppy growers further resorted to irrigated fields) and
explained part of the total augmentation, these 3,400
tonnes were far higher than the 185 tonnes of 2001 when
the last harvest was made under the Taliban.
In
fact, 2002's 3,400 tonnes match the 3,300 tonnes of
2000, when the Taliban first successfully aimed to
reduce opium production following the all-time record of
4,600 tonnes of 1999.
It is now up to Karzai's
transition government to try to progressively cut
Afghanistan's opium harvests. Matching what the Taliban
did in 2001 - with 185 tonnes of which only 35 were
produced in the zones under their control - seems
unreachable to say the least. Preliminary estimates by
the UN for the 2003 harvest show that while clear
efforts were made to eradicate part of the culture in
the main areas of production - Helmand, Kandahar,
Oruzgan, Nangarhar but not in Badakhshan - opium poppy
was also planted for the first time in other districts.
There is no doubt whatsoever that in 2003
Afghanistan will top the world's production of opium
ahead of Myanmar, whose production dropped to 800 tonnes
in 2002.
To a certain extent, the future
harvests will testify to Karzai's political and
territorial control on his country, population and
factions. They will also make it possible to evaluate
and judge the success of Western intervention and
assistance. It is advisable, however, to keep in mind
that in the current context of insecurity and lack of
rebuilding and development, no drastic eradication
should be implemented as many Afghan peasants have
largely invested in this economic activity and depend on
it for their very survival.
To overcome opium
production in Afghanistan, the government and the
international community must not impose eradication
without implementing a broad program of alternative and
integrated development, both in the regions of opium
production and in the rest of the country. Such programs
must be implemented in a progressive way and, most
importantly, in stable political and territorial
conditions. Long-lasting peace combined with political
as well as economic development must be achieved if
Afghanistan is to be successfully rid of its illicit
drugs economy and war economy nexus.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, PhD, is a
geographer and research fellow at CNRS in Paris. He
produces www.geopium.org.
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