# Posted 8:59 PM by Patrick Belton  

MORE FROM OXBLOG'S INTREPID AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT:

In this episode, our dashing Afghan adventurer meets Poppies and Pesticides

After lunch, we drove back into town with the local farmer's association to check out their almonds. Like Kunduz and most of the rural Afghan towns I've visited, Tashqurgan offers a forbidding face to any stranger in its streets. High mud-brick walls enclose every home, with windowless, domed clay roofs appearing over the wall. Once you leave the bazaar, the only buildings open to view are ruins or mosques, all usually empty. The outhouses and sewers drain directly into the dusty streets. To a Western eye, the residential areas have a stifling lack of public space -- no parks, few open areas. But the private spaces are elaborate, comfortable, and beautiful; as soon as a gate opens, you can see whitewashed houses, grape trellises, canals, and gardens just inside. From the street, you would hardly realize there was a tree in town. Inside the compounds, you realize that the whole city is an orchard. It's a disconcerting mix of external squalor and internal beauty.

We drove through the streets in our convoy of SUVs, with the shooters keeping a sharp eye out for trouble. For some reason, we were turned away from several gates. When we were finally admitted to one of the farmers' compounds, our suspicions were confirmed: under the almond and pomegranate trees, the whole place was one big opium poppy field. The flowers were tall and gangly, not the deep red carpet from Oz some of you might be envisioning. It was the beginning of harvest season; the bulbs had been scratched to extract opium gum, and most of the poppies had bloomed a pale pink. The farmer chuckled with mild embarrassment, then took us around to diagnose the pest problems he was having with his almonds. In the next compound we visited, the farmer had diversified his crop, growing a broad row of cannabis around the poppies.

Needless to say, anyone working in Afghan agriculture has to deal with the question of poppy cultivation. Afghanistan produces a ridiculously high proportion of world opium -- somewhere between 70 and 79 percent, these days. Poppies can be grown profitably even under drought conditions (though irrigation greatly increases their value), and are on average four times more profitable than wheat. They're also labor-intensive around harvest time, requiring eight or nine times as much labor as wheat -- but there's no shortage of labor in Afghanistan, especially as this is a job rural women can perform. The poppy price dropped more than expected at this year's harvest, but because farmers can hang on to the dry opium for months, they'll probably still cut a significant profit.

Opium isn't just valuable as a cash crop, but as cash... and credit, too. The Afghan banking system collapsed over the decades of war and Communism, with the final blow delivered when the Taliban enforced a clumsy interest-free "Islamic" banking mandate and dismissed all female bank employees. Inflation soared, credit dried up. Only the central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (Pashto for "Bank of Afghanistan", not ebonics for "The Afghanistan Bank") survived. Throughout rural Afghanistan, opium became the de facto currency, and opium traders paid local farmers a lump-sum in advance for their yearly crop -- in effect, a loan on highly advantageous terms for the traffickers. Even now that Afghanistan has a few banks and a stable currency, "narco-lenders" are still an important source of credit for many farmers.

Does this make opium a good thing for Afghan farmers? No, not really. Interest rates are high on narco-loans, often trapping the farmer into future opium production; and the money has played a part in funding all those guns and landmines floating around rural Afghanistan. The opium trade has had a terrible effect on neighboring countries, too, enriching powerful mafias and contributing to appalling rates of heroin and opium abuse. Despite its draconian anti-drug policies, Iran has nearly as many junkies as all of Western Europe -- in absolute numbers, not as a percentage of population! And of course, Afghan opium also helps fund the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which is no good for anybody.

The Taliban famously banned poppy cultivation in July 2000, which led to a slight thaw in international condemnation of their regime, a plunge in world opium supply, and a dramatic spike in prices. However, they didn't ban the opium _trade_, and their ban came immediately after the 2000 poppy harvest. They had apparently stockpiled a great deal of opium, and made money hand over fist from the ban. (Our friends in the Northern Alliance also cleaned up, incidentally, planting tremendous amounts of opium poppy in their stronghold province of Badakhshan). The Taliban didn't provide any alternative crops for the farmers, and so their ban impoverished innumerable Afghans already hard-hit by drought. We'll never know whether the Taliban would have maintained the ban had they remained in power past 2001, but I rather suspect they would have retracted it long enough to rebuild their stockpiles, then tried to trade a new ban for international favors (something like what North Korea's doing with its plutonium). The remnants fighting along the border have now declared that it's religiously okay to cultivate opium for its "medicinal properties." Right.

President Karzai's declared ban in January 2002 doesn't seem to have had much effect; he isn't beating up farmers on the same scale as the Taliban. Cultivation spread to a number of previously poppy-free provinces last year. Some local governors implemented eradication measures along the highways, but moved their own poppy fields up to remote mountain areas. In Balkh province, the "eradication" usually takes place just after the opium has been harvested. All in all, it's not a terribly impressive performance.

My friend Mumtaz reports that a local commander near Kandahar recently told him: "If Karzai says, 'Don’t grow poppy,' I will still grow poppy. But if Khalilzad says 'Don't grow poppy,' well, then I will be poor." (Zalmay Khalilzad is the American ambassador to Afghanistan). The Americans have hit a number of heroin laboratories and drug markets belonging to warlords, and could presumably knock out a lot more if they chose. It's a dangerous game -- there are some very rich folks out there (including some in the Kabul government) who could start stirring up trouble for the U.S. occupation if it cuts into their opium profits. But I think at this stage, we're better off taking the risk and hitting the traffickers than burdening the farmers with a major eradication program. Give the big donor-funded agricultural projects another couple years to demonstrate alternative cash crops (almonds, raisins, cumin, etc.), set up rural credit and finance institutions, and fix up irrigation structures, so the farmers have genuine alternatives to poppy. Then the government can start enforcing a ban at the farmer level. The U.N. has also suggested scheduling big public works projects to coincide with that labor-intensive opium harvest season, to draw labor away from poppy farmers. It's an interesting idea, which to my knowledge hasn't been tried, but deserves to be.

In practice, I doubt we'll have a couple years to set up alternatives. I suspect that if the Afghan presidential election goes ahead as scheduled, and Hamid Karzai wins as scheduled, we'll see a strict ban reiterated this fall. The elections are supposed to fall in September, and poppy planting generally starts in October; Karzai won't have to antagonize rural Afghans by declaring an eradication policy during his campaign, but there'll be plenty of time for tough talk and interdictions before that other presidential election scheduled for November... And by spring, when the poppy crop comes up, we'll see an eradication program. There's too much pressure from Washington, where a number of "eradicators" with Latin American experience stand to profit from a push to clear fields in Afghanistan.

Anyway, that day in Tashqurgan we told the farmers that we couldn't fund them unless they signed a paper promising to cease poppy cultivation. They told us they understood, and would take that into consideration when deciding whether they wanted our funding. Our California experts examined their almonds and pomegranates. We then all sat down on a big red carpet under a shade tree, and the farmers passed around refreshments -- a tray of white mulberries, and six glasses of shorombe, "the Afghan beer," as Mohibi called it. Shorombe, known as "dogh" in Dari, is sour yogurt blended with salt, pepper, and sometimes cucumber. It's held to make you drowsy, and was a favorite beverage of the Taliban. (My colleague Rahimi, who worked in Kabul during the late 1990s, once commented to the Taliban Minister of Rural Development that the Northern Alliance could take Kabul without firing a shot, if they only knew to attack during the hour from 2:00 to 3:00 every day when everybody in every ministry was in a shorombe-induced stupor. Fortunately, the Taleb was amused by this observation).

We drained our glasses and got down to business. The California agriculturalists noted that a number of the almonds had been infested by bugs, and asked what pesticides the farmers here were using. The farmers broke out a couple of bottles covered in cheery pictures of worms, beetles, flies, tomatoes, corn, wheat, and other pests/crops. Our expert read the bottle: "Methyl parathion. Huh. You know, they took that away from us in the States a few years ago. Highly, highly toxic. Are you guys wearing any sort of protective covering when you spray this?" No, they hadn't ever been told that was necessary. The expert put down the bottle gingerly and looked for someplace to wipe his fingers. "Yeah, in California after we sprayed this stuff, we had to post a sign telling everyone to keep out of the field for a week or so. Don't suppose you do that here?" No, they definitely didn't do that. The expert looked around a little anxiously. "You use it on the almonds. Anything else?" Well, yes. Pretty much everything else. Including the produce, like the cucumbers that had probably gone into our shorombe. We stopped eating the mulberries.

After a couple more questions about how many people had dropped dead with poisoning symptoms in Tashqurgan in recent months -- thankfully few -- we decided to our relief that the bottle was most likely full of a diluted or totally different solution. Mohibi called up the pesticide vendor and chewed him out for his misleading bottle illustrations that had suggested that methyl parathion went well with tomatoes. Yeesh. We chatted for a little longer with the farmers, and suggested other pest control means. Then, as it got on toward late afternoon, we decided it was time to head to Mazar.

[next time: why the helpless Kabul government/powerful warlords story ain't necessarily so] (0) opinions -- Add your opinion