Poppy harvest creates easy work, good money May 12, 2008 - ctv.ca
KANDAHAR -- You can tell when it's poppy season around Kandahar and Helmand provinces because the roads are crowded with pickup trucks, and the pickup trucks are crowded with young men going back and forth to work in the fields. So many trucks that a Canadian military officer I met last year, wondered if it was the beginning of the Taliban's spring offensive.
It was an offensive all right, on the fields of delicate pink flowers and green gummy pods that produce most of the world's supply of heroin.
In Afghanistan, the poppy harvest is not unlike the autumn grape harvest in France, or tobacco season in southern Ontario. Large numbers of itinerant workers make their way to the fields where they can pick up a couple of weeks of steady employment. For many Afghan families, it's a vital part of their yearly income. The going rate of pay is about $10-a-day, and the work doesn't seem that difficult -- if you discount the risk.
I asked an Afghan colleague if there were any poppy fields near Kandahar City, and a few days later, I got a call to be ready to go for a drive at 7 o'clock the next morning. We climbed into his car and headed west through the city. A right turn down a farmer's lane, a short walk through a grain field, and there before us -- voila -- a gentle, pastoral scene of harvest time in southern Afghanistan.
The irony of it all was overwhelming. Soft morning light. A couple of kids playing in a field nearby. Pretty pink flowers that you would love to have in your garden. The sound of an Afghan man singing a folk song as he moved from plant to plant extracting the resin that will eventually become white powder cooked on a spoon, drawn into a syringe, and shot up a vein.
The harvest itself is very crude. The green bulbs, some the size of a small fist, are scratched with a razor blade or garden tool and that makes the gum bleed to the surface. The four or five men working the field then collect it, thumbing the resin into small glasses, their clothing smeared with dark stains that will never wash out. I look down at my pants, and they're stained as well, just from walking through the rows.
There are no guards around, no weapons, the field is almost in plain view of the road, yet there's no fear of being discovered or raided by the police. Probably, says my colleague, because the police have already been paid off by the owner. There was some preliminary suspicion about us, but they seemed to accept the presence of a television camera with little more than curiosity, even boredom.
It seems a pleasant distraction to have westerners taking their pictures and asking about the harvest. How long does it take to fill a glass? How much do you get paid? Do you know what happens after the resin leaves this place? Do you care?
We talk to Shawali who has a trimmed black beard and a big smile of indifference.
"We are just trying to fill the glass and each day to earn some money," he says. "I don't care what happens after that."
And how long does it take to fill a glass?
"Within half an hour I can fill it."
The job comes with a built-in desperation for work. And when the harvest is over, it will be the Taliban that starts recruiting people like Shawali and the thousands of others who are out harvesting poppies, just to be able to feed their families. Some will end up as fighters, others as couriers, driving explosives into Kandahar City for use against NATO troops.
Oddly, for its development projects, Canada is drawing from the same labour pool as the Taliban. Hiring local Afghans to dig ditches or build schools and roads. More jobs, could mean fewer Taliban guns pointed in their direction, or bombs planted on the side of the road.
"It's a good business," says Shawali. He gets 500 Afghanis a day harvesting poppy resin, compared with maybe 100 or 150 a day doing other hard labor. And jobs are very hard to find, work of any kind. Think about it. That's what the Canadians are up against. These vast fields of poppies are a staple of the Afghan economy.
Is it hard work, I ask?
"It's an easy job," he says, "because we're getting some good money."
A car drives down the laneway blocking our vehicle and we decide it's time to leave. You don't want to linger in a poppy field, in Kandahar, where the Taliban are a constant threat, and western journalists a prized target.
We leave Shawali back in the field, moving from bulb to bulb, with his hands and clothes smeared and sticky from the poppy resin, and more money in his pocket than he's seen for a long time.
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