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Poppies |
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Opium cultivation persists in Afghanistan despite a lot of tough talk from the West, undermining nation-building and funding our opponents. Now it’s spreading into Iraq as well, and Afghan farmers are more than happy to lend their expertise.
Want a solution for the poppy problem? I have one that I think is worth trying. The problem is, no one is going to like it.
Let’s pay Afghan farmers subsidies not to grow opium poppies. Then, let’s hire as many local people as we can to build infrastructure. Then, let’s publicly bust some corrupt government officials and give them jail time for their involvement in the black market.
Think my idea is stupid? Let me give you the other options:
1. Current Strategy: Wring our hands about the problem and blame the Afghans. Constantly threaten to eradicate crops from the air. Spend a bunch of money fighting the Taliban, and wonder why we can’t defeat them (hint: one reason is the money they make from the opium/heroin trade).
2. Eradication: Spend a bunch of money to eradicate crops, only to send the price shooting through the roof, increasing farmers’ incentive to grow more. Watch more poppies crop up in out of the way places. Repeat as needed.
3. Legalize the trade: Sure, great idea. Except nobody needs more medical opiates. According to International Crisis Group, countries like Turkey, India, and Australia can already produce enough to meet demand. Also, legalization would drive the price down, forcing farmers back into the black market.
Still think we should eradicate? Let’s forget about the Islamic fundamentalism boogeyman for a moment and think about what country in the world is most like Afghanistan. How about…Colombia? In Colombia we’ve been fighting the war on drugs for years. Let’s look at how it’s been going:
Plan Colombia, which has cost $5.4 billion, most of it to bankroll fumigation and modernize Colombia’s army, has done little to erode the flow of cocaine into the United States. In Colombia, coca has not been wiped out, just spread out  redistributed to smaller, harder-to-reach plots, spread out across virtually every state, in a country that is twice the size of France.
The fact is, virtually as much coca is growing in Colombia as was cultivated at the start of the aerial fumigation program in 2000, American statistics show.
And United Nations data shows that while there has been success at eradicating coca across the main coca growing countries in the South American Andes  Colombia, Bolivia and Peru -– the region still produces more than enough cocaine to satisfy demand in the United States and Europe.
“Eradication has fallen flat on its face,” said Myles Frechette, who was Washington’s ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990’s. “We’ve discovered, and it’s right in the reports by the State Department and ONDCP, that after five years of Plan Colombia, the amount of acreage under cultivation for coca is the same as it was five years ago.”
So, if we’re going to spend five and a half billion dollars eradicating coca plants (or poppies), only to have production continue unabated, why couldn’t we just give that money to the people who need it? Combine that with some suggestions from ICG, and you might generate a workable strategy:
Given the involvement of corrupt officials, efforts to tackle this scourge must start at the top. There are about 25 to 30 key traffickers running the trade in Afghanistan, according to a recent UN/World Bank report. These figures should be targeted with asset seizures, and put on trial or extradited to the US or Europe. NATO should support efforts by Afghan counternarcotics forces to destroy labs and warehouses and interdict drug shipments. Regional linkages between Afghan, Pakistani, and Iranian trafficking networks also need to be addressed, and the international community should pressure Pakistan to arrest its traffickers and corrupt border security officials.
For the small farmers there must be comprehensive rural development to tackle some of the world’s worst poverty. This should particularly target the areas that are not yet producing on a large scale, to help inoculate communities from the lure of traffickers. This means infrastructure such as roads, irrigation, and cold storage; providing seeds and fertilizer; training in marketing and distribution for other crops; and wider community development that offers schools, healthcare, and security. Once there are sustainable alternatives to poppy, manual eradication becomes easier.
Of course, it is always going to be difficult to make major inroads into drug production in Afghanistan without addressing the international demand for illicit drugs. The most realistic medium-term aim is to clean up the government so that officials linked to drugs do not undermine the spread of the rule of law and turn the country into a narco-state.
No solution is perfect. But giving out subsidies demonstrates a deeper understanding of the problem than eradication does. For major drug dealers, thugs, and militia, trade in opiates is a criminal issue. For farmers, however, it’s an economic issue. If we refuse to grapple with the problem on that level, we will not solve it. So why not try spending our money in a way that might actually get a return on our investment, instead of pointlessly playing the tough guy and achieving nothing?
nice post alex. you actually beat me to the punch on a similar piece I was writing for Colombia. I think it’ll be distinct enough, so it’ll still be forthcoming. In any case, I agree with your analysis. Paying farmers not to grow is the way to go. They could still cultivate land, growing other crops that aren’t as lucrative as poppies but which (with the US paying them not to grow poppies) would be icing on the cake, you know?
It’s ridiculous that our government continues to throw money into the black hole that is eradication. Why do our policies have to rely on destruction? it’s a bullshit mentality that governs our actions abroad, and a little common sense in Washington could go a long way.
If it’s good enough for Kansas, it’s good enough for Kandahar.
While I have serious issues with crop subsidies as practiced in the US, none of the other near-term solutions for Afghanistan are going to do even a bit of good. If down the road, a vibrant Afghan farming sector started producing food in such quantities that the subsidies began to pose the indirect danger of putting other farmers in the region out of business, I think that’s a problem we’d all rather have.
Still, if a person were going to seriously do that, you need to transfer more than seed and fertilizer. The landscape there is, by many accounts, quite denuded and the topsoil in bad shape. What you’d need for true sustainability is a raft of permaculturist extension agents to go in and help them farm in ways that would begin the process of restoring the land. Farming can be a nominally low tech activity, but it may require sophisticated knowledge and foresight in order to make it work as desired.
absolutely, there’s no perfect solution but destruction is definitely one of, if not the worst way to go. its arrogant, imperialistic and does nothing to foster good relations (whose importance is becoming increasingly obvious). it is definitely a case of offering better than what drug cultivation can. there’s actually quite an informative piece on VBS.tv on coca growing in Bolivia, although I wouldnt agree with them that tackling the problem at the point of consumption is the answer. still, pretty insightful.
Colombia is set to become a laboratory for drug eradication programs over the next few years as the Plan Colombia budget is set to shift dramatically (though not completely) from military aid to social and economic programs. Of course, they have tried alternative development programs in the past but run into some problems:
- Coca is an exceptionally hardy crop, able to grow multiple harvests per season in areas with infertile soil where legitimate crops won’t grow. I don’t know, but I imagine poppies are similar. So simply giving people money to grow different crops isn’t enough, and either moving people to more fertile areas or reclaiming large swaths of land is not feasible or prohibitively expensive.
- They tried a “forest guards” program in Colombia that paid people to tend to areas of the jungle instead of growing illicit crops, but because guarding the forest wasn’t very labor intensive, people just took the money and grew coca in their spare time. Monitoring compliance is extremely difficult (and expensive) in a large-scale program in hostile conditions.
- Only subsidizing coca growers creates perverse incentives, pushing people to grow coca so they can be part of the program. Also, you can’t subsidize only palm oil producers that used to grow coca, because the price will drop for previously legitimate palm oil producers, forcing them into new, likely illegitimate crops.
- Farmers don’t receive a large slice of the cocaine trade pie, but making up the difference between selling coca or opium and selling dates or flowers is a very, very large chunk of money.
- Eradication makes crops scarce, which drives up the price, but so would subsidies. That would give more people an incentive to grow illicit crops, forcing the program to expand and pay more money to make up the potential drug profits.
I think some combination of subsidies and labor-intensive enforcement like manual eradication can work, but these programs are being tried now on a smaller scale and facing a lot of obstacles.
I hope it doesn’t seem that I’m suggesting subsidies plain and simple. For this post I wanted to emphasize my opinion that subsidies, rather than eradication, represent the core of a workable program. All of the points you cite are important, but I think that the ICG report I cite, in combination with the idea of subsidies, offers some good ideas to counterbalance some of these problems. I’m basing some of my argument on the idea that people don’t really want to grow drug crops; what they want is money and stability and freedom from violence. So a combination of subsidies and meaningful, well-paid work might offer people an economic way out without leaving them, for lack of a better word, idle and tempted to grow more drug crops. Helping local people build an independent economic base might also help weaken ties between them and drug/militia groups.
I also think there is perhaps more potential for a workable solution in Afghanistan than in Colombia (in Colombia, it seems, some of the problems are caused by own domestic policies vis-a-vis drugs). To state the obvious, we occupy Afghanistan. Their government is essentially our puppet. Therefore I believe we have much more leverage to affect outcomes (also I know considerably less about Colombia, and can only make general observations). If we can figure out a way to subsidize other types of farming, put large numbers of Afghans to work building infrastructure, and reduce corruption in local government, maybe we can make some headway.
I could be completely wrong. But I think what I’m proposing is no less sound than current US military strategy in Afghanistan. We’re getting nowhere fast there, and we need to make some basic shifts before we can even dream of achieving change and success.