Afghani Opium: Are vouchers the answer?

On the 8th August 2009, The Washington Post (The Post) published a useful article on Afghani Opium Poppy production, how it may link into the Taliban and what the US and UK Governments are trying to do about it.

The link is in the title above, but you may have to register with the paper in order to see it in full.

Here is the latest plan. Prior to the next planting season in October, the U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy. U.S. and British officials are hoping to provide alternative sources of legitimate income to what has been Afghanistan’s most profitable cash crop.

Opium is thought to be a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest. The two government s hope that by offering vouchers, selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm labourers to work on roads and irrigation ditches that they can when the farmers off their cash crop.

It can also be seen that the Bush administration's focus on crop eradication, which "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan ha failed. According to Mr Holbrooke destroying the crops succeeded only in "alienat[ing] poor farmers" and "driving people into the hands of the Taliban," he told reporters last week.

The Post notes, however, that many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programme s have failed as well, from Asia to Latin America. “A similar plan in Colombia, begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of cocaine production.”

It is also worth noting that the centre of the overlapping wars against opium production and the Taliban is southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, where more than two-thirds of the country's poppy is grown.

Most of you will know that this is where thousands of US Marines and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in villages as they are cleared.

"By this time next year," the senior military official said, "what we want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric of success. If we don't get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, we're not going to get the results we'd like."

But here comes the rub. The Post article goes onto report that according to Mr Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf region. Apparently there is also widespread agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to continue cultivation, processing of opium exports.

According to a United Nations report, the scale of the problem is huge:

§ More than 365,000 Afghan farm households earned about $730 m from poppies last year.

§ FYI, that amount is very nearly equal to the national government's $750 million in official revenue.

§ Both figures are dwarfed by the estimated $3.4 billion earned from opium exports.

According to the United Nations, "The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households," The U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey also reported, "farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income," 70 percent of which came from their poppies.

After production costs and local taxes, the average Helmand farmer (cultivating less than an acre of land) nets about $900. That is more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices and assuming he has only planted approximately half his land with poppies.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per acre is highest, opium poppy seed capsules are lanced on average of four times in a labour-intensive process.

Again the UN report quoted sheds valuable light on why this crop is so important in the Afghans way of life.

The average daily wage for unskilled labour is as follows:

§ For construction work it is $3.60.

§ Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and

§ Opium "lancing/gum collection" pays $9.50.

§ Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, which are the highest in the country.


Now this blog aims to allow much greater communication. If anyone out there has any ideas as to how to constructively deal with the opium production issue, well I implore you to post them here and we can try and save a few lives!