The virtues of doing nothing: Why
focusing on Afghanistan’s opium makes the opium problem worse
July 21, 2009 - Reuters
It would be an understatement to
call opium cultivation in
Afghanistan America’s headache. The issue of illegal drug cultivation
and smuggling has vexed policymakers for three decades, and led to a
multi-billion dollar campaign to combat the phenomenon.
Opium causes all of our problems, so they say—according to a factsheet at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul (pdf),
opium creates instability, funds the insurgency, and wreaks havoc on
the government. They’re not alone - entire books have been written on the subject.
The blame game on opium, however, ignores a critical - and quite
uncomfortable - fact: it misses the point. The reality is, while the
cultivation of opium does not help matters from a Western perspective,
in Afghanistan it is actually a healthy economic activity. The concerns
over its cultivation, too, are overblown: even a brief look at the
numbers show it to be at best a trailing indicator of insecurity,
insurgency, corruption, and economic malaise. Opium, therefore, is only
an indicator of other, more substantial problems.
Consider, for example, what I call The Nangarhar Swing.
According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, in 2005
Nangarhar produced nearly 1/5 of Afghanistan’s opium, but was virtually
poppy-free in 2006. 2007 saw a 285 percent increase (pdf) in
cultivation, making the province one of the country’s top poppy
producers. Yet in 2008, it was once again virtually poppy-free (pdf). This shift
cannot be tied only to security, as many like to claim: according to the violence statistics
compiled by the Long War Journal, even as Nangarhar has stopped the
large scale cultivation of opium, it has become steadily more violent.
Moreover, there are many other areas of the country, like Khost
province along the border with Pakistan, or Kunar province further
north, where the insurgency has become worse even as those provinces
were emptied of opium.
The
discrepancy is really a trick of language: When the UNODC declares a
province poppy-free, what they mean is, production there is
“negligible”, not non-existent. Whether that is in the context of total
production, other provinces, or some sort of absolute number (a
percentage of arable land or total worldwide opium production) isn’t
really clear. In Nangarhar, several times declared “poppy free” by the
UNODC, there remain active opium eradication missions in outlying
districts such as Sherzad. What’s noteworthy about it is not the
presence of some fairly smallish opium farms in southwestern Nangarhar,
as most opium farms are small family affairs. What is interesting is
the density of the farms. In a single 5 km stretch of the countryside,
teams found and destroyed 100 poppy fields. For a supposedly poppy-free
province, that is simply stunning.
It also covers up the substantial effect of destroying the opium
economy. In many parts of Afghanistan, opium is the economy, and the World Bank estimated in 2008
it accounts for 1/3 of the country’s economy. In opium-adjacent
communities, opium funds underpin the entire local economy: especially
in the opium “heartland” in the South, the only way for small farmers
to get microcredit loans or deal with exporters is through opium
traders. Through a system of loans called salaam, they in essence
create informal futures markets on crops… but only opium. Cereal crops
and fruits, or other licit agriculture, are not included in this system
(even though it is possible for other actors, whether the government or
NGOs, to provide this service). In fact, the ways these markets have
developed in the south is remarkably similar to how informal credit
markets formed in rural medieval Europe. It is normal. The West just
happens to dislike the crop.
But even in opium “success stories”, there are significant problems
to simply removing the crop. In Nangarhar, the wild swings in opium
prices and cultivation crashed the rural economy
again and again. Most of the microcredit salaam loans farmers take out
are not denominated in any currency - they pay in opium. So, when
prices crash or an eradication team sweeps through, farmers become
trapped in a horrendous debt cycle where the only means of escape is to
grow yet more opium. There are even rumors of farmers selling a
daughter or son to the traffickers in payment, and many families have
fled to either Iran or Pakistan to avoid reprisals for unpaid opium
debt.
There is a more fundamental economic problem to growing poppy,
however: areas that grow opium actually tend to be the wealthiest.
Sherzad District in Nangarhar, where there is still opium cultivation
and eradication, actually has relatively high income compared to the
rest of Nangarhar. According to the International Monetary Fund (pdf),
when Nangarhar province saw a huge drop in opium cultivation in 2005/6,
province-wide GDP was about $1.3 billion (which was a big drop from the
year before, when there was much more opium). The next year, 2006/7,
when opium production spiked 285%, province-level GDP rose to $3.2
billion, only to fall the next year to $1.8 billion as the UNODC
declared it poppy-free.
So what is to be done? The Obama administration has wisely recognized that opium eradication is a non-starter,
and does far more harm than the marginal good of destroying some opium
crops. UNODC Chief Antonio Maria Costa recently agreed, and suggested a “flood of drugs”
in its place. Under this plan, somehow the borders of Afghanistan would
be sealed so that no drugs can “escape”, in their words, thus crashing
the price of opium. Feasible or not, Costa’s idea at least tries to
examine other ways of reducing the need for opium cultivation. Looking
at opium cultivation as an economic factor, however, leads one to many
other conclusions that are inconvenient for a political and military
apparatus designed to oppose the very idea of drug cultivation.
If opium is an economic puzzle, and not a political-military one,
then there should be an economic (or at least non-military) solution to
it. Several years ago, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit published a study (pdf)
comparing the factors behind the cultivation of opium in adjacent
provinces in the “poppy-free” north. Water shortages, soil moisture and
salinity, severe socioeconomic inequality driving food insecurity, a
poor presence of formal institutions, all have decisive impacts on a
household decision whether or not to cultivate opium.
More recently, a team of Norwegian researchers has noted a strong
causation between violence and opium cultivation, but not in the way
most think: in their research paper (pdf),
they assert that opium follows conflict, and not the other way around.
In other words, opium cultivation is simply a feature of ungoverned
conflict zones, and especially in Afghanistan, something people do as a
last resort when other economic activities fail to provide for their
families.
Taken together, these studies (and the many others like them—this is
a growing field of study) point to a counterintuitive conclusion: do
nothing. That is, focusing only on opium misses the point, and doesn’t
address the reasons why it is grown. If opium cultivation were an
indicator of an ungoverned or contested space, then that would indicate
that making that space governed and uncontested would also address the
opium.
There are a few examples even within Afghanistan where governance
and security came first, and then opium cultivation simply dropped off.
Badakhshan province was the only province in the country that was
completely Taliban-free in 2001, and as a result was the only one to
grow opium in any really measurable amount during the Taliban’s
prohibition. Since the American invasion, it has remained mostly quiet,
and has seen a growing success in both trade connections to neighboring
areas and better governance by multiple levels of officials. As an aid
worker active there told me recently, “the price of poppy has fallen
fastest in the north (where the poppy has a lower morphine content),
and in Badakhshan, farmers can already make more from okra or onions
than opium.” Selling vegetables is relatively low risk and carries a
good profit margin - something that cannot be said for the majority of
Afghanistan’s non-subsistence farmers.
Drug traffickers have taken enormous measures to lower the risk of
drug cultivation, but the development community has not taken the time
to do so for legal agriculture. It remains prohibitively expensive to
ship anything out of Afghanistan, and border politics especially with
Pakistan (one worker recently complained that difficulties in crossing
the border into Pakistan meant an entire crop of potatoes from Khost
province rotted at the border crossing, unsold) keep export-driven
agriculture uncertain and extremely risky. By focusing so much of its
energies onto eradication or somehow controlling the cultivation of
opium, both the International Community and the government of
Afghanistan have ignored providing other ways for farmers to make money
legally - even when Alternative Livelihood programs exist in an area,
they’re poorly administered and often barely make a dent in the local
economy.
So why not do nothing? Opium is not Afghanistan’s biggest problem -
it is horrendous poverty, bad infrastructure and no security. When it
comes to all three problems, Afghanistan faces two major hurdles -
underinvestment (money, equipment, education, health, and security) and
corruption-driven illegitimacy. Making matters worse, the overwhelming
majority of aid in the country flows outside government channels or
oversight, which undercuts Kabul’s legitimacy even among the people it
helps.
Focusing only on opium, therefore, doesn’t actually focus on the
more fundamental problems facing the country. It is an obsession on
symptoms, while the causes go unaddressed. The missing piece of
governance, and with it the development of the necessary institutions
of society and economy, is the critically ignored piece of almost all
plans to eliminate opium in Afghanistan. And as examples like
Badakhshan have shown, when even moderate progress is made on these
fronts, people will voluntarily switch to growing other crops, and they
will make enough money to support themselves. It’s enough to make one
wonder just why there needs to be a plan in the first place. It’s
counterintuitive, but scrapping the West’s counternarcotics policies is
surest way to actually achieve the counternarcotics goal of a
poppy-free Afghanistan.