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Record harvest

Since much of this poppy will end up on streets in Europe and America after conversion into heroin and similar drugs, popular western media has come down hard on the increased production. But it has yet to address the main reasons behind the meteoric rise in the narco-trade, which originates in Afghanistan’s hilly terrains and settles with consumers in the world’s richest cities, after passing through a multi-million-dollar network of middle-men, agents and traffickers.

For one thing, there is hardly any mention that the Taleban had brought down drug cultivation to less than 1,000 metric tonnes at the start of 2001, before bringing the entire exercise to an unprecedented grinding halt just prior to the American onslaught in October of that year. For all their faults, the hard-line clerics did put an end to bitter fighting and violence, which people on the ground point to as the strongest catalysts fuelling opium production that currently stands above 6,000 metric tonnes annually.

Also, billions of western taxpayer dollars pumped into anti-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan will continue to go waste so long as they amount to little more than targeting and punishing small farmers growing the crop for want of better options in the struggle to survive. The real culprits are traffickers smuggling the raw form to ports in the west, where it is treated and sold in the black market. In the absence of these middle-men, the ingredients will find an easier way to the legitimate pharmaceutical drug industry, where it is used as input in important medicines.

But the first order of business in the war on drugs is restoring order in Afghanistan. It is little surprise that the province that supposedly serves as the British stronghold produces more cannabis than entire countries. So long as chaos will reign supreme, and growers will have little infrastructure and hence little signs of normalcy to look forward to, they can hardly be faulted in going for the harvest that assures subsistence more readily than other options.

Analysts familiar with Afghanistan’s history expressed just such fears when western overconfidence refused to acknowledge the strength of a fast growing insurgency half a decade ago. And since that realisation is still broadly missing, it wouldn’t be too off-scale to predict one such record harvest after another till a pronounced change in policy is visible in Afghanistan.