Afghan farmers turning to opium

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — Abdul Hamid’s pomegranate trees were scarred from bullets and shrapnel. The river was low and the land dry. There was no profit anymore from the fruit that made his district in southern Afghanistan so renowned for something other than war.

So this month, Hamid’s field hands began destroying his 800 or so pomegranate trees in Kandahar’s Arghandab district. He looked on as the century-old orchard, farmed for generations by his family, was turned into a graveyard of twisted trunks, discarded fruit and churned earth.

“There’s no water, no good crops,” Hamid, 80, said.

The decision to destroy his entire orchard is one that Hamid and many other Afghan farmers in the district are making to earn an income after a series of devastating harvest seasons. A crippling drought, financial hardships and

unpredictable border closures at the war’s end have sent them scrambling for the security of the region’s most reliable economic engine: growing opium poppy.

One orchard turned poppy field means little on the broader scale of Afghanistan’s opium output, the largest in the world, accounting for more than 80 percent of the world’s supply, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

But what is happening in Afghanistan may have ramifications for the drug’s production and trafficking. Many fear that this season is an early warning of much higher cultivation in the future.

“Next year you will see poppy crops,” Mohammed Omar, 54, another

pomegranate farmer, said as he strutted through his orchard, hands clasped behind his back.

His field hands pulled the season’s last remaining fruit from the spiny branches above.

“There’s nothing else,” Omar said.

Poppy growth in Afghanistan has steadily increased in past years. The total area under poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was estimated at almost 900 square miles in 2020, a 37 percent increase from 2019, according to a U.N. report.

“It is shameful, we know, but we are compelled. What else can we do?” Omar said. “Everyone is cutting trees.”

Jim Huylebroek / New York Times A field hand destroys a pomegranate tree with a sledgehammer in Arghandab, Afghanistan, earlier this month.