Afghanistan: Another Bumper Opium Crop

By Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi in Mazar-e-Sharif (ARR No. 174, 28-May-05)

Thanks to plentiful rains earlier this year and late efforts at poppy eradication, farmers in northern Afghanistan say they’re enjoying a bumper crop of the opium-producing plant this season.

While President Hamed Karzai has called for a jihad, or holy war, against poppy growing and an international coalition has been carrying out its own campaign against the drug, even some senior government officials acknowledge that most eradication efforts have come too late and achieved too little.

Afghanistan produced an estimated 4,200 metric tons of raw opium last year, amounting to 87 per cent of world supply, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“This year’s rainfall has increased our harvests over last year’s,” said Mohammad Nazar, a farmer in the northern Balkh province, happily showing a fat green poppy pod to an IWPR reporter.

Opium, the raw material for heroin, is produced in most provinces of Afghanistan. While no official estimates were available, reports suggest that this year's crop will surpass last year's harvest.

Local farmers who heeded warnings that their poppy crop would be eradicated and opted to grow other plants are now sorely disappointed that they will miss out on the profits from a lucrative harvest.

"The poppy fields have not been destroyed as people said they would be, so those farmers who didn't plant poppies were very sad," said Nasrullah, another Balkh farmer.

The harvest was a boon for farm workers. “I was unemployed before the opium collection season but now I’m working in the poppy fields making 300 to 400 afghanis a day,” labourer Mohammad Omar told IWPR.

Reports of the bumper crop come even as Karzai, during a recent visit to the United States, rejected criticism of his counter-narcotics effort, saying his government had worked hard to eradicate poppy fields. Instead, he blamed western countries for a lack of support.

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