Opium Poppies Take Root Once Again in Afghanistan

No one could be more delighted about the departure of the Taliban regime than the opium poppy growers here in eastern Afghanistan.

In July 2000, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued an edict banning poppy cultivation across Afghanistan, then the world’s largest producer of the flower pod used to make heroin.

For years, the Taliban had used taxes on drugs to finance its military. That all changed, however, with Omar’s eight-line message. According to a recent report by the U.N. Drug Control Program, the decree brought raw opium production in Afghanistan to a virtual halt, dropping from 3,276 tons to only 185 tons in just one year.

But now that the local Taliban has retreated to the mountains, there is an eagerness among farmers here in the irrigated lowlands south of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.

On Wednesday, farmer Ahmed Shah and his neighbors were busy fertilizing and tilling their small plots of land, preparing to plant poppy seeds that will be harvested next April, processed into heroin in neighboring Pakistan and delivered to overseas markets.

“I can make 10 times more with poppy than I can with wheat,” Shah said as two teenage boys turned the soil nearby.

The farmers of eastern Afghanistan are fully aware of the epidemic they feed with their beautiful flowers. They see the hollow-eyed addicts in the bazaars of Peshawar when they travel to Pakistan.

“We know we are creating addicts,” Shah said. “The only reason we are doing this is because we are poor. If I could find another job, I would stop growing poppies.”

Samsul Haq, deputy director of the Nangarhar Drug Control and Coordination Office, estimates that before the Taliban edict, 85% of the Jalalabad agricultural economy was driven by opium production.

“This is a great opportunity for poppy growers,” Haq said. “The Taliban is gone. There is confusion about what kind of new order is coming in. The farmers are free to plant poppies.”

Haq said that unless poppy production is checked by massive foreign aid to provide the farmers with an alternative, Afghanistan is almost certain to return to its dubious distinction as the world’s top supplier by next summer.

The farmers in Kariz, a mud-walled village of 600 families where everyone grows poppies, see opium as the fastest, surest way out of the wrenching poverty brought on by more than two decades of war and turmoil.

On one side of the farmland lies an irrigation canal built under a 1950s Soviet foreign aid program. In the distance are two twisted and broken high-tension towers that date to a time when this area had electricity. Everywhere are signs of war: carcasses of downed Soviet aircraft and armored personnel carriers; a military base pocked with huge craters from more recent U.S. bombing attacks; desiccated groves of olive and orange trees abandoned more than a decade ago during the moujahedeen fight with the Soviet-backed government.

Haji Saifuddin, a 60-year-old farmer, has been growing poppies for more than 20 years on several plots he owns near Kariz. He alternates poppy planting with cotton, maize and wheat.

“When the Russians returned to their homeland,” Saifuddin said, referring to the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, “I was a refugee in Pakistan. I started growing poppies when I got back.” He said it costs him about $100 for fertilizer and seed for each jerib (about half an acre) of poppies he cultivates. Saifuddin said his return on each jerib is about $5,000, a small fortune here.

The Kariz villagers, Persian-speaking members of the Afghan “Arab” tribe that claims to be descended from Arab traders who traveled and settled here centuries ago, live modestly in compounds with courtyards planted with mulberry and date trees.

But a few miles away along another farm road are massive homes that jut up above high, gated walls with sentry towers on each corner. Haq said these mansions are occupied by opium traders, Afghanistan’s drug barons. Some were built in the style of modern, Western architecture. One was made from the traditional adobe but many times grander, appearing on the horizon like a giant sand castle complete with turrets.

The Taliban ban on poppy cultivation--instituted four years after the repressive regime came to power--had an instant, devastating effect on the local farmers. Nangarhar province is the second-biggest producer of opium poppies in Afghanistan, topped only by Helmand province west of the Taliban spiritual center, Kandahar.

“I took an advance on opium before the ban,” Saifuddin said. “I was forced to sell 12 jeribs of land to pay it back.” Another farmer, Abdul Shakoor, 70, said he lost $6,500 because of the ban.

Because of the decree, the Taliban lost much of its support among the poppy growers. The villagers said there are only two active Taliban members left in the village.

The farmers are more hopeful about the new political order being created here. The post-Taliban governor of Nangarhar province, Haji Abdul Qadir, also served as governor from 1992 to 1996, in what is known as the warlord period.

Qadir, an educated moujahedeen commander, started out ambitiously with a staggered program to cut poppy production.

Under promises from Western governments that his province would be given technical and financial assistance in exchange for opium controls, he cut poppy production by 25% in his first year as governor. But when the promised foreign aid did not materialize, Qadir became enraged, lecturing a visiting delegation of international drug experts.

“Next year,” Qadir told the drug experts, “our farmers will not only cultivate poppies in their fields but on the roofs of their homes and in their flowerpots.”

This kind of talk was music to the ears of the farmers of Kariz village. Earlier this week, several of the local elders, including Saifuddin, trooped into the governor’s mansion in Jalalabad to declare their support for Qadir.

But uncertainty about the stability of the new order also has them worried. If the current Nangarhar government--composed of a triumvirate of three former moujahedeen commanders, including Qadir--fails, that might open the door to rule by a countless collection of local commanders and warlords.

“Most of the farmers are happy because they now grow poppies,” said Haq, “but they are also fearful that these commanders will steal their income from opium.”