Falling Afghan poppy crop

While economic data for Afghanistan is unreliable, reports suggest Taliban govt ban costing farmers about $1 billion

Afghanistan’s poppy output has come crashing down since the Taliban government banned cultivation of the plant last year. The massive drop has caused a sharp reduction in the production of opium, heroin and morphine, severely hurting the drug lords. But conversely, the ban has made life even more difficult for the poor farmers who used to grow the crop. Most poppy farmers have shifted to wheat, but that is far less profitable, and it is not as if the farmers were raking in the cash anyway — the real ‘value addition’ comes after processing the crop, and even ‘successful’ farmers usually only made enough to keep themselves above the poverty line.

While economic data for Afghanistan is unreliable, reports suggest the ban is costing farmers about $1 billion, or over 10% of the country’s GDP. It is also worth noting that drug lords haven’t just quit the business. Most have shifted to synthetic drug production, especially methamphetamine, which is commonly referred to as meth or ice. Afghanistan is also a producer of the ephedra plant, which can be used to produce methamphetamine. However, experts in the UN and elsewhere say most of the meth traced to Afghanistan was manufactured using cold and flu medication or industrial chemicals, as crop output is too low and unreliable for large-scale production, given that the Taliban have also banned ephedra cultivation.

But whatever the fate of Afghanistan’s status as a narco-state, the fate of the Afghan people has become more precarious due to the loss of revenue. Experts say the only way to bring farmers the same kind of profits as poppy is to encourage fruits and tree crops, but these can take several years to become productive and profitable, which is a timeframe poor farmers cannot afford. With dwindling employment opportunities in the country, the situation is ripe for a new surge in illegal migration from Afghanistan, which will place stress on popular destination countries in the West, and ‘transit’ countries like Pakistan, which is already trying to remove millions of illegal Afghan migrants.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2023.

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