Reasons behind opium cultivation

After thirty years of continuous violent conflict, Afghans live in an environment of acute risk and high insecurity and obtain most benefits from their traditional cultural institutions and the informal economy. Over decades poppy production like other illicit activities were engaged in to provide financial resources for conflict. The conflict, in turn, created the lawless environment for poppy cultivation, heroin processing and trafficking to thrive in. In many areas of the country farm holdings are too small to cultivate enough in food crops to sustain an entire family. Farmers therefore rely on cash crops or off farm labour to tide them over. Opium poppy, though illicit, is one of the most attractive crops farmers can grow. It fetches good prices, is not perishable but can be stored for long periods after harvest should a break down in security prevent farmers from taking their crop to market. There is a sophisticated marketing and financing system allowing farmers to borrow money against future harvests, and to carry debts over for years on end. Farmers do not even need to travel to market as many opium traders collect the produce at the farm gate. As a non perishable, high value but low weight product, opium has been called, a low risk crop in a high risk environment.

The main requirement for poppy cultivation is labour intensive as the poppy flowers have to be pierced and the poppy sap collected. This is hard, back breaking work, which farmers get done by using their extended family, through a system of reciprocal labour arrangements known as ashar – where farming families will work on each other’s land at harvest time – and by employing farm labourers. Harvesting opium has provided the rural poor with the opportunity to earn between 150 Afghanis per day for weeding, up to 500 Afghanis during the peak harvest season. This has a knock on effect on labour costs in other parts of the economy like construction, but also injects spending power into rural economies. Poor farmers seek to mitigate these costs by using non-renumerated labour, by staggering planting and using different poppy varieties with different maturation rates.

For larger, more capital intensive farmers, who are closer to markets, the rise in labour costs combined with falling opium prices has made opium less attractive. Poorer farmers working marginal land in more remote areas, or sharecropping, that is working other people’s land in return for a share of the crop, however, continue to depend on opium and its by products, the stalks which can be used for fuel and seeds for oil. One farmer said “opium is not just money, it is fuel, it is oil, it is credit, it is good for the land.”

Families that have been hit by drought or other disaster resort to poppy cultivation as a coping strategy. Often after having sold off their livestock and household items, like carpets and implements like ploughs, and mortgaged their land. Equally, people displaced by fighting or returning from refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran can find a livelihood in cultivating opium poppy. This comes at the price of entering into exploitative patron-client relations with local power brokers structured by strong hierarchies and inequalities. While these may provide informal, noncodified rights and security, they require for the poor a bargain whereby short-term security is traded for long-term dependence and vulnerability. Local power brokers may combine government office with a range of illicit activities, including opium production and trading. Government is perceived as deeply corrupt, and the drug control activities are often regarded as driven by self interest and the pursuit of individual gain.

Opium production has extended to all parts of the country, but predominantly to areas where the security situation is weak, including Helmand, Badakhshan and Nangarhar. There are however, widespread misgivings as many people hold that recreational opium use is against the teaching if Islam and  known as haram, and that dominance of illicit opium traders is holding back the economic development of the country. For the time being, however, opium cultivation is considered as a form of managing the risks of licit produce markets, which are affected by general price fluctuations as well as the vagaries of the security situation. Against the situation of a weak security environment, natural conditions, established trading networks and experience Afghani poppy farmers enjoy a strong comparative advantage in opium production, with relatively high yields and a ready and steady demand. Farm gate prices do fluctuate, depending on the time of year and the yield of any particular season. There has been a fall from US$ 300 in 2002, to under US$ 90 in 2005. Perversely, successful eradication stabilises the opium prices, providing a tacit incentive to farmers to carry on planting.

At present, the benefits of opium are distributed unevenly across Afghani society depending on the role different actors play in the economy. Better off farmers with larger landholdings and other resources tend to intercrop poppy with food crops and cash crops. Often they will let out part of their lands to share croppers in return for part of the opium crop. These farmers have been the principal beneficiaries from the rise in opium prices. The share croppers and other poor farmers working on small plots of marginal land on the other hand are often burdened by debt. Few have been able to profit from high prices as earnings are consumed by debt service. During the harvest season even poor farmers will hire wage labourers who move across the country following the poppy harvest. There are an estimated half a million of these itinerant labourers, many of whom have lost their own land to war, drought and debt.
 
The benefits of the opium trade are unevenly distributed, with the bulk of the profits reaped by traders, wholesalers and refiners. The largest profits accrue in the export trade to Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Local warlords and militia fighters extract ‘taxes’ from poppy farmers, and government officials at all levels take bribes, often known as ‘facilitation fees’ in exchange

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