Opium Season (3 of 5 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein. Copyright 2007 by Joel Hafvenstein.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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PART ONE, LITTLE AMERICA (CONT'D)

How do you convince a farmer to give up the perfect crop?

Picture a rugged, desert country in which a seven-year drought has emptied the canals and a twenty-five-year war has wrecked roads, schools, and markets. Orchards and vineyards have been bombed, fields and pastures mined. The millions of farmers and farm workers in this country have few sources of credit, no banks, and a national currency that until very recently was worthless. Many don't actually own land, and in fertile areas the competition for sharecropping work is intense.

Now imagine a drought-resistant cash crop. It grows during the wheat season but fetches a much higher price than wheat--anywhere from five to twenty-five times higher, depending on the year. This crop doesn't bruise or require refrigeration, so the lack of reliable roads and electricity is no obstacle. Once harvested, its gum can be kept for months or years before processing, so villagers stockpile the gum and use it as cash. The traders in this crop are a sophisticated, internationally connected bunch who offer credit; they'll pay farmers in the winter for a certain amount of gum in the spring. Landowners are more likely to accept sharecroppers who agree to cultivate this crop. It offers the most reward for the fewest risks, with one significant exception: The government might plow up your fields if it catches you. The government is weak, though, and plenty of local authorities are involved in the trade themselves.

The country is, of course, Afghanistan, and the crop is opium poppy, the raw material for heroin. Opium has been grown in the Afghan mountains for millennia, but it took two and a half decades of civil war to turn poppy into the country's economic mainstay--and to turn Afghanistan into the heart of the global heroin trade. During the long war that began in 1979, the country's government slowly disintegrated, local warlords began to support themselves by trafficking opium, and brutalized farmers turned to poppy as their best chance of escaping poverty. By 1992, Afghanistan had passed Burma as the world's largest opium exporter. By 2004, the largest sector of the Afghan economy was narcotics (generating well over one-third of its gross domestic product), and Afghanistan produced a staggering 87 percent of the world's illegal opium.

Opium brought me back to Afghanistan in November 2004. On my previous trips, I had worked with Chemonics' projects to restore the once-thriving Afghan agricultural sector. None of those programs had focused specifically on poppy. We hoped that by helping Afghan farmers cultivate and market legal crops, we would eventually give them a ladder out of poverty that didn't involve opium. We called it a strategy, but it was just a simple, plausible justification for leaving poppy out of our plans for the next few years.

The scale of the 2004 opium harvest wrecked that strategy. For the first time in history, farmers in all thirty-four Afghan provinces chose to plant the perfect crop. They carpeted an unprecedented 323,000 acres of land with poppy, which was 126,000 acres more than the previous year, and almost 99,000 acres above 1999's prior record. The harvest of opium gum fell just short of record levels, thanks to bad weather, disease, and poppy-munching parasites. Still, by the end of the season in summer 2004, Afghanistan's addiction to opium had unmistakably reached a new peak.

As the extent of the harvest became clear, the political rumbling from Washington and Kabul grew thunderous. George Bush and Hamid Karzai both had elections to win in the fall. Both knew their rivals would use the high poppy crop against them, though in rather different senses: Bush could expect a rhetorical bruising from the Democrats, while Karzai risked losing provincial control entirely to rich and well-armed drug lords. Neither president had the patience to rely on long-term projects of agricultural development. As the yearly report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime euphemistically declared, Afghan farmers would require "more robust forms of persuasion" to give up opium. A comprehensive poppy eradication campaign was on the way.

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