Nearly a decade into the war in Afghanistan, opium poppies are still the major crop for many farmers and a big source of income for the Taliban despite expensive efforts to stamp out cultivation.
“Opium requires less work, less water and makes more money,” explained Haji Matiullah, a farmer from Maywand district in the violent southern province of Kandahar, a fertile ground for both poppies and Taliban militants. “I would say nearly 80 percent of people in our district grow opium for very obvious reasons… it is easy.” War-torn Afghanistan produces around 90 percent of the world’s opium, most of which ends up as heroin on the streets of Western cities or supplies some of the one-million drug-addicted Afghans. It also helps fund a Taliban insurgency that, nearly 10 years after the extremists were ousted from power by a US-led invasion, is killing more foreign troops with every passing year. The violence only encourages more farmers to grow the crop, said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan country representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “In a period of insecurity or conflict, poppy is the best crop to plant. If you’re a farmer, you think: ‘They (drug lords) come to my farm, provide seeds, loans, they’ll come to my farm gate to pick up the harvest,” he told AFP.
This saves the farmers from travelling long distances on often unsafe roads dotted with landmines and criminal gangs launching ambushes. Many officials now see Western-led poppy-crop destruction — on which hundreds of millions of dollars was dished out earlier in the war — as a flawed solution. “It’s difficult to win hearts and minds when to attack poppy fields is to attack the local population,” said one Western security source, speaking on condition of anonymity. Earning support in rural areas is a key part of the West’s military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. But poppy cultivation — thought to provide a living for six percent of all Afghan households — shows precious few signs of dying out of its own accord.
While a UNODC report last week predicted a small drop in cultivation across the war-torn country this year, it said poppies would likely return to five northern provinces which were free of them in 2010. Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand remain by far the biggest centres of poppy cultivation, with nearly three-quarters of Afghan opium coming from the two southern provinces, also typically scene of the war’s bloodiest battles. In their often dirt-poor villages, where most men rely on agriculture to feed their families, poppy growers are guaranteed a good income from opium.
