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Taliban leaders have cracked down on poppy farmers throughout Afghanistan and made the crop used in drugs like heroin illegal. Farmers across the impoverished country are trying to figure out ways to turn a profit without the relatively lucrative crop.
Despite the U.S.’s effort to tame poppy production, more farmers became producers in recent years. NPR pointed out that in 2021, the year the U.S. exited the country, about 438,000 acres in Afghanistan were devoted to poppies, which would yield enough opium to produce 650 tons of heroin. The country’s opiate production makes up about 14 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP.
The NPR report said the Taliban banned the crop when it was in control of the country in the late 1990s. The U.S. ousted the Taliban from control in 2001, and the fields began to emerge once more. The Taliban issued an edict in April that banned poppy cultivation.
The country is the world’s biggest opium producer and the Taliban’s move to eliminate the crop will likely destroy the livelihoods of millions of farmers already dealing with financial hardships.
News reports indicate that armed Taliban fighters visit these farms in the southern Helmand province and use tractors to tear up fields while farmers look on. The Taliban condemned opium as anti-Islamic.
Mullah Abdul Haq Akhund, the Taliban deputy interior minister for counter-narcotics, told the Associated Press that those found in violation “will be arrested and tried according to Sharia laws in relevant courts.”
Noor Mohammed, the owner of a poppy field in Washir, watched his plot of land torn up by the Taliban. He said his farm is small and lacks water so it will “not earn anything” without the poppy. ABC.Net.Au reported that poor villagers often borrow money to buy staples like flour, sugar, and cooking oil on the promise of the upcoming poppy season.
TRENDPOST: The New York Times reported that Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between “hypocrisy and holiness” because opium production helped to fund their 20-year insurgency against the U.S.
The previous American-backed government had spent $8.6 billion on poppy eradication, but top Afghan officials were deeply complicit in the opium trade, building garish “poppy palaces” and on “gaudy villas in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.”
The paper said an inspector general’s report in 2018 concluded that the campaign to end poppy cultivation “had no lasting impact.”
Speakers at the World Economic Forum last month warned that Kabul is edging toward an economic collapse, and completely icing out the country because governments disapprove of the Taliban leadership is shortsighted.
Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN’s Development Program, said, “we cannot abandon 40 million Afghans simply on the principle of moral outrage,” the Associated Press reported.