Can Afghans fight the drug trade by growing wheat?
Afghanistan is the biggest opium supplier on the planet, responsible for over 90 percent of the world’s supply. While Andrew Exum remains skeptical about including the fight against drugs as part of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, limiting the effects of the narcotics trade could be as easy as installing an irrigation ditch, some say. ...
Afghanistan is the biggest opium supplier on the planet, responsible for over 90 percent of the world's supply. While Andrew Exum remains skeptical about including the fight against drugs as part of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, limiting the effects of the narcotics trade could be as easy as installing an irrigation ditch, some say.
Afghanistan is the biggest opium supplier on the planet, responsible for over 90 percent of the world’s supply. While Andrew Exum remains skeptical about including the fight against drugs as part of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, limiting the effects of the narcotics trade could be as easy as installing an irrigation ditch, some say.
From my good friend Bilal Sarwary, a longtime BBC correspondent from Afghanistan:
Sheen Goal was among the hundreds of farmers in Sherzad — a mountainous district in Nangarhar, once counted among Afghanistan’s biggest poppy producing provinces — who gave up poppy cultivation more than two years ago and embraced other crops after they were promised a road, an irrigation channel and a clinic for their village.
The farmers did so despite a threat from the Taliban, who wanted them to continue with poppy cultivation.
The farmers have largely kept their part of the bargain.
But the government has failed, says Sheen Goal.
[…]
“I guarantee that no farmer will grow poppies if they were helped with irrigation and fertilisers,” says Rashid, a farmer in Gandomak.
It may still be too early to tell, but what we’re observing could represent a continuing trend; as many as 20 out of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces were declared “poppy-free” last fall by the United Nations — seven more than the year prior.
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