National Post (National Edition)
Pink revolution
Taliban has new poppy seeds that may double opium output
ZHARI, AFGHANISTAN • It’s the cash crop of the Taliban and the scourge of Afghanistan — the country’s intractable opium cultivation. This year, many Afghan poppy farmers are expecting a windfall as they get ready to harvest opium from a new variety of poppy seeds said to boost the yield of the resin that produces heroin.
The plants grow bigger, faster, use less water than seeds they’ve used before, and give up to double the amount of opium, they say.
No one seems to know where the seeds originated. The farmers of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where most of Afghanistan’s poppies are grown, say they were hand-delivered for planting early this year by the same men who collect the opium after each harvest, and who provide them with tools, fertilizer and farming advice.
To the villagers, the shadowy men are intermediaries for drug lords and traffickers working with or for the Taliban, underscoring the extensive web that fuels the opium trade and keeps the poppy farmers in a clasp of terror and dependency. The impoverished farmers have little recourse but to accept the seeds and other farming materials on credit, to be paid back when they harvest the crop, continuing a never ending cycle of debt.
Afghanistan’s poppy harvest, which accounts for most of the world’s heroin, is worth an estimated US$3 billion a year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Production hit a record high in 2014, up 17 per cent compared with 2013.
The trend is expected to continue in 2015, in part thanks to the new seeds, according to officials tasked with overseeing the eradication of poppy crops.
The harvest in late spring is expected to surpass last year’s countrywide record of 7,800 tonnes by as much as seven per cent and 22 per cent in Kandahar and Helmand provinces respectively, officials said.
Experts say the Taliban, who have been waging war on the Kabul government for more than a decade, derive 40 per cent of their funding from opium, which in turn fuels their insurgency.
Fierce fighting in recent months in poppy-growing regions shows the Taliban’s determination to protect their trafficking routes.
Gul Mohammad Shukran, chief of Kandahar’s antinarcotics department, said the new seeds yield “better drug plants, which require less water and have a faster growth time.” “This is a big threat to everyone,” he said, adding that Afghanistan’s central authorities had failed to act on his warnings.
Growing poppy for opium is illegal in Afghanistan and forbidden under Islam. But Afghan farmers feel they have no choice. For more than a decade, the government and its international partners have pleaded with them to grow something else — wheat, fruit or even saffron.
When that didn’t work, the police were sent to destroy crops. And when that failed, the Americans and the British tried handing out free wheat seeds, an enterprise that found little fertile ground.
This spring, the opium fields have again erupted in a sea of bright pink poppy flowers.
The new poppy seeds allow farmers to almost double the output from each plant, said Helmand provincial police chief Nabi Jan Malakhail. At harvest, collectors cut the bulb of the plant, allowing the raw opium to ooze out. This resin dries and is collected the following day.
Malakhail said the new seeds grow bulbs that are bigger than usual and can be scored twice within a few days, thus doubling the quantity of raw opium. The plants mature in three to four months, rather than the five months of the previous seed variety, allowing farmers to crop three times a year instead of just twice.
In Kandahar’s Zhari district, farmer Abdul Baqi said he knows poppy growing is illegal and that, given a choice, he would “rather eat grass.” But, he added, “I cannot feed my kids with nothing but the air.”
I cannot feed my kids with nothing but the air