JAMES MEEK | Friday
WITH only a few weeks left before the peak of the opium poppy planting season in Afghanistan, time is running out for Western agencies to offer alternatives to farmers who are planning to harvest the drug next year.
United States anti-narcotics officials spoke this week of the need to give aid to farmers who would otherwise have little alternative but to plant poppies. Yet farmers with hungry families are already having to make the tough economic, moral and legal decisions involved in deciding what crops to grow. Poppy seeds are normally sown at the end of the year. So far there is no sign here on the ground of any representatives of the West’s war on drugs.
Yunis Qanuni, the Interior Minister of the Northern Alliance, which now exerts a loose control over much of Afghanistan, said this week that he was committed to ending the country’s status as provider of up to 75% of the world’s heroin.
“One of the basic plans for the future of our country is the elimination of the growing, production and sale of opium,” he said. “Once we have peace all over the country, then we can take action.”
There are, however, reasons to doubt his words. The alliance turned a blind eye to small-scale opium poppy cultivation in the areas it controlled even before the collapse of the Taliban. It still does not control the big poppy-growing areas in the south. And apart from heroin, Afghanistan has, for the time being, virtually nothing that the rest of the world wants to buy.
“Now is not the time for planting or harvesting, so we’ll see,” said Omar, a Kabul heroin dealer. “We’ll see whether these were just words of the alliance. Maybe they, too, will take bribes.”
Asked whether a combination of Western help for farmers and action by an Afghan government would stop opium production, Omar – not his real name – at first said it would.
“If there was serious government pressure, the peasants would stop growing poppies, especially if they were given free fertilisers and free seeds for other crops.”
He paused, and thought again. “Then again, the peasants might choose not to. When they’re earning so much from the poppies, it’s not very likely. People will still grow poppies in secret. People get richer quicker that way.”
Omar insisted he not be identified or photographed, but otherwise seemed unconcerned about any threat of arrest.
He is part of an international heroin smuggling network. Omar receives prepared heroin from a factory in Jalalabad and sells it to clients using a Kabul grocery shop as a cover. The collapse of the Taliban and the arrival of the alliance had introduced a certain caution in the trade, he said, but he believed it would be temporary.
“We have the stuff. It’s ready, but we’re waiting,” he said. “We’re not selling to anyone we don’t already know. We’re just holding back a little bit. We don’t want to be the ones chosen as an example for punishment.
“As long as there’s no legal government controlling the sources of production, as long as the [heroin] factories haven’t been destroyed, the trade will continue.”
Last week Asa Hutchinson, head of the US drug enforcement administration, said recent events in Afghanistan had given the West “a rare opportunity to influence 70% of the world’s supply of heroin”.
At the same time, he put his finger on the key problem. “It’s so ingrained in the economy of Afghanistan and the economy is so wrecked that it’s an easy thing for the population to turn back to.”
Easy it is. The economics of poppy cultivation are compelling. The 7kg of seed required to sow a single hectare cost a million Afghanis, less than $20. That hectare would be expected to produce about 10kg of khanka, the raw material from which heroin is made. Each kilogram sells for up to two million Afghanis. In other words, from planting in January to harvesting in July, $20 has become about $380.
Abdullah, a farmer in the agricultural district of Bagrami on the edge of Kabul, said he had grown poppies four times. When the white flowers bloomed, he took pride in his crop. “All the same, your soul hurts. But we needed to feed our families.”
Abdullah, who also asked that his real name not be used, said people like him needed help if they were not to plant poppies again. “We need industry to be working again. We need free fertiliser and seed. We need bread, we need work, we need education.”
The conventional wisdom, reported by international drug monitoring agencies, was that poppy production under the Taliban went through two phases, one where it was legal, another where it was all but ended by an effectively enforced ban.
According to Omar, however, the Taliban’s crackdown was never as real or complete as it appeared to the outside world.
“They broadcast their ban on the radio to show the world that they were putting pressure on the growers, but in fact there was a lot of it going on. They all took bribes to allow people to carry on growing. Close to the city, where the fields were visible to everyone, including foreigners, they punished people who grew poppies, they pulled up the crops, they burned them.”
Omar said that the fall-off in opium production in the latter years of Taliban rule had as much to do with drought as with an enforced ban.
Abdullah said that despite the lure of easy money, many Bagrami peasants did not want to plant poppies, knowing that Islam considers heroin to be forbidden. “The Taliban said: ‘Look, plant it, we’ll send it abroad to where the unbelievers live’.”