Opium Again Hooks Struggling Farmers

KABUL, Afghanistan — Mohammad Ashrafy waited for the death of the family figurehead, a respected mullah, before he finally planted opium for the first time this year.

And sometimes, when he gazed out over the huge stretch of poppies he grew on his land in the Ghor province of central Afghanistan this spring and summer, he felt guilty, recalling the admonishments of his late uncle, Mullah Mortaza Khan.

“We know growing opium is against Islam, but we have to do it,” said Ashrafy, 38. “I was the only person left here not growing it and there was no mullah telling me to stop.”

The United Nations estimates that half of Ghor’s farmers don’t earn enough to cover basic needs. So exhortations to plant alternative crops seem doomed when a grower can make about $5,200 from an acre of opium but just $121 from an acre of wheat.

Ashrafy and his brother support 35 relatives, including the widows and children of two other brothers killed in the country’s long wars.

Last year, Ashrafy grew wheat, but it provided only half of what the family needed. “If I don’t grow [opium],” he said, “I’m sure we’ll die because we cannot grow enough wheat for ourselves.”

So he prays to make peace with Allah.

Throughout Afghanistan, thousands who had not grown opium before began harvesting their crops in May, taught by experienced poppy farmers who have been traveling to new growing areas to share their skills.

“It’s much easier than wheat and you get more money too,” said Ashrafy, interviewed in Kabul. “Last year, [opium] was about 10% in our area. This year it’s 100%.”

Afghanistan regained its position as the largest opium producing country last year, yielding 3,750 tons, and production is expected to be as high this year, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reports. Seventy-five percent of the world’s heroin, which is obtained from opium poppies, comes from Afghanistan.

At a June congressional hearing in Washington, Bernard Farhi, chief of the operations branch of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said opium brought Afghanistan $1.2 billion last year, equaling the total of international aid to the country in that period. In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund said opium accounted for as much as half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, amounting to $2.5 billion in exports.

Opium cultivation was permitted for years by the Taliban, the radical Islamic regime that allowed the Al Qaeda terror network to flourish in Afghanistan. But in July 2000, more than a year before the United States ousted it, the Taliban banned the crop and instituted the death penalty for opium crimes, leading to a dramatic decline in production.

Now the regions outside Kabul are under the control of warlords, many of whom benefit from the trade. Last year’s production was nine times higher than during the final year of Taliban rule.

Without a national police force or army, President Hamid Karzai’s interim government cannot enforce its poppy ban, leaving drug-eradication workers exposed to retaliation. In June, seven of them were mobbed and killed by enraged poppy farmers in Oruzgan province, 250 miles southwest of Kabul, where authorities were making a major effort to reduce the poppy crops.

Some critics complain that the war to oust the Taliban and subsequent political deals with warlords have resulted in U.S. support for men linked to the opium trade.

Other critics charge that the U.S. anti-drug campaign focuses on the Andean region of South America while overlooking more pressing concerns, such as the extent to which the Taliban and Al Qaeda may now be funded by the drug trade in Afghanistan.

Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply in recent months with an increase in attacks by anti-government militants. Many argue that without better security in the provinces, efforts to control poppy growing will fail.

“The fact of the matter is you can’t stop opium production when the warlords control the regions and when we don’t expand security beyond Kabul,” Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said at a May hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on drugs and terrorism. “It was a power vacuum created by warlords and drug traffickers that enabled the Taliban and Al Qaeda to turn Afghanistan into an international swamp ... and now we’re back in the same situation again.”

In the last four years of devastating drought, many smaller farmers went into debt. This year, many of them were given loans and seeds by drug traders, to be repaid upon harvest.

Barbara Stapleton, advocacy and policy coordinator for the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, said the poppy business “amounts to the development of indentured labor in Afghanistan.”

“Farmers are lent money at the outset for their crop, but if the market goes wrong, they’re in hock,” said Stapleton, whose nongovernmental organization helps coordinate Afghan aid. “The poppy harvest has failed in some areas this year. And if you are a small farmer and you have been lent this money, then you are in the beginning of a vicious cycle.”

Ashrafy, the Ghor province poppy farmer, said commanders under a local warlord, Ahmad Murghawi, last year took a commission of about $175 from farmers for every kilogram of opium, a claim that could not be verified. This year’s rate had not been set, he said.

The political fate of the governor of Ghor province, Ebrahim Malakzada, is a telling example of what can happen to those who try to stop poppy growing.

“This year, the only person who said not to grow opium was the governor,” Ashrafy said. “He met with the elders and told them not to let people grow poppies. Then a commander chased him out and he had to flee.”

The deputy governor, Mulladin Mohammad Azimy, seized the official governor’s residence, and Malakzada, an ally of Karzai, was forced to live in Kabul for a time.

Malakzada confirmed that he had problems after he tried to stop the opium growing and said he still couldn’t venture into parts of Ghor.

“There are lots of places in Ghor province where they’re starting to grow opium. It’s because we don’t have the power to stop it, and the central government doesn’t care about our security and power,” he said in a phone interview.

He blamed an enemy, Ismail Khan, the governor of neighboring Herat, for the increased poppy crop, saying Khan was allied with his opponents in Ghor who profited from drugs. Khan also opposed the Karzai government, the creation of a national army and the disarmament of militias, Malakzada said.

The United States has tolerated many powerful provincial warlords because they are anti-Taliban, critics say.

An expert on the international drug trade, Rensselaer Lee, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that control of drugs had taken a back seat to fighting terrorism, building consensus and alliances.

“To build these alliances, unfortunately we’ve had to make some arrangements, compromises with people who frankly may have some history of involvement with the drug trade and may be even currently protecting the drug trade,” said Lee, president of the Virginia-based research group Global Advisory Services. “This is a tragic situation because, given these consensus-building imperatives of the war against terrorism, it is inconceivable that Afghanistan can ever develop as a nation without getting a handle on this opium problem.” Lee did not identify those involved.

Ahmad Shinwari, 26, a Kabul-based drug trader, has been in the opium business for nine years. His family is from the Shinwar district of Nangarhar province, a prime growing area not far from Pakistan.

“Everywhere the people who are doing the deals have big people behind them: commanders, governors, everyone,” he said. There are 25 opium factories in Shinwar district that mostly export through Pakistan, he said.

Shinwari was reluctant to discuss whether he was still dealing heroin, but acknowledged that he used to make $350 a day.

Shinwar district growers were upset this year because poor crops and a huge increase in production in northern Afghanistan have meant declining prices. Growers last year were paid about $500 a kilo, but this year the prices tend to be lower -- in some cases $300 a kilo.

Many were convinced that foreign planes had sprayed crops in the area with herbicides, Shinwari said, a claim denied by U.S. officials.

“We don’t know what you did this year, but we had a really bad year on our farms. People blame foreigners for spraying chemicals,” he said.

In early June, Karzai called for $20 billion in foreign aid, warning that without an economic boost people would have to live on the opium trade.

Afghan Finance Minister Ashref Ghani also has warned that without more international aid Afghanistan could become reliant on the drug trade and crime -- a problem that would be more expensive to fix than providing short-term aid.

“The narco-mafia state will have the lowest indirect price tag,” he said -- a warning echoed by aid agencies. “But it will have the highest indirect costs.”