Another try at reducing the Afghan poppy trade
The United States is dropping the stick and picking up the carrot in combating the Afghan poppy trade. The new anti-drug policy ends the effort to eradicate poppy fields and will now focus on giving farmers financial and technical aid to help them replant their poppy fields with wheat and other food crops, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Past efforts to reduce the number of poppies, the basis for opium and heroin production, used a mix of incentives, but consisted primarily of eradication programs, like the cutting and burning of poppy plants. Richard Holbrooke, the senior American official for Afghanistan policy, tells the Wall Street Journal. "All we did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into the hands of the Taliban."
While eradication campaigns may have made life tough for farmers, they did not materially impact the drug trade. Over the past decade, Afghanistan's share of global poppy production has grown from about a tenth to over 90 percent of the world total, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
Holbrooke bluntly informed the New York Times that "[t]he Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure". The new policy of crop substitution, while laudable, faces many of the same challenges that derailed the earlier plans.
Switching from poppies to other crops isn't a simple task. One of the reasons that poppy production is so profitable is that drug traffickers pick up the poppies at the farms. If they grow a food crop, farmers must build storage buildings and get the crops to often distant markets. While bearing these higher costs, they must also contend with prices both lower and less predictable than poppy prices. Even if they can subsist on the less profitable food crops, they have to deal with threats of violence from the Taliban, which opposes any switch to non-poppy crops.
What's more, the Afghan political elite has a vested interest in the poppy crop. The United States intelligence community estimates that only $70 million out of $3 billion dollars of drug receipts go to the Taliban, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In a Committee report, officials related that many of the recipients are U.S. allies and members of the government.
"These warlords later traded on their stature as U.S. allies to take senior positions in the new Afghan government, laying the groundwork for the corrupt nexus between drugs and authority that pervades the power structure today."
Most business owners wouldn't invest in a high-risk product with low returns. So it's understandable that Afghani farmers aren't making the switch from poppies to wheat in droves. There are likely to be some parts of the country with sufficient security and strong enough markets for the program to succeed, as Ganesh Sitaraman, a lawyer for the Counterinsurgency Training Center Afghanistan, notes in a New York Times op-ed.
The U.S. is to be applauded for switching from a destructive, ineffective policy to a constructive, potentially effective policy. This new policy will only be part of a larger effort, that will have to include greater security for farmers, to reduce the scale of the Afghan poppy crop.
Digg
Facebook
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Printer-friendly version
Comments
The United State’s policy of
The United State’s policy of eradication towards Afghan poppy crops – supported by both the British and Afghan Governments - has always been a bone of contention with me. Not only did their previous efforts to halt production of the crop arise from what I believe was a misguided sense of justice; it never even made the slightest bit of economic sense.
When the policy was first implemented there was a belief and a hope that – when thought of in very simple terms – made some sense. How could the Taliban fund themselves through the opium and heroin trade without the poppies? The answer was that they couldn’t. The problem was that there was no way to achieve that goal without completely destroying the livelihoods of thousands of Afghan farmers whose lives were entirely dependent on the market that the Taliban established for them. Not only did the Taliban pay higher prices for the poppy sap than a farmer would ever hope to get from a food crop of the same acreage, they also provided a relatively reliable market for which to sell it. The United State’s approach of blanket eradication never seemed to recognize the need to also construct a viable way in which to replicate an equally desirable market for the farmers to turn to after the destruction of their flowers. The US left farmers to fend for themselves in regions that often times didn’t even have a substantial military presence to protect them from Taliban retribution. Combined with the pressure the Taliban put on them in both physical and financial terms - by offering desirable seed loans for new poppy crops for instance - farmers quite naturally turned to their only available option, the Taliban.
I commend US envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke for finally making a stand against the problems of the policy. Speaking at the G8 Summit in Italy last weekend, Holbrooke stated that the policy “didn’t reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar.” His proposal of offering technical and financial help to farmers willing to trade out their poppy crops in exchange for food crops is perhaps not the final answer but it does signal a much needed change from the monotone policies of the past eight years. Although both the British and Afghan Governments have recently stated that they plan to continue a policy of eradication, the weight of the Holbrooke’s word may eventually convince them otherwise.
A Step In The Right Direction?
I find it encouraging that the United States and its allies are beginning to switch tactics in their battle against poppy production in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the tactics that were being used in the Afghan "drug war" resembled those used in various other narcotics producing regions around the globe. If nothing else, history has shown us that it is almost (if not entirely) impossible to eliminate the production of illegal drugs through the application of military force. More often than not, forcible attempts aimed at preventing the manufacture of narcotics simply lead to an escalation of violence, rather than keeping drugs from being produced. Worse yet, the victims of this violence are rarely the criminal organizations responsible for the distribution of illegal drugs. Rather, it is the farmers who are hardest hit. Naturally, these farmers become angry with those responsible for the loss of their livelihoods, making it even more difficult for foreign governments to operate in the region. A militaristic approach to drug eradication quickly becomes self-defeating in this way.
Ultimately, the most effective way to prevent developing regions from producing drugs is to promote localized economic development. Farmers in Afghanistan produce poppies because it is in their direct best interest to do so. As the United State's new approach seems to recognize, the best way to prevent people from producing drugs is to provide them with a realistic, profitable alternative. If the proper financial incentives are combined with adequate physical protection for farmers who choose to abandon poppy production, then it is only a matter of time before farmers will begin to produce other (more socially desirable) crops.
Four years down the road U.S. finally leaves eradication behind
The idea of 'sustainability' regarding the eradication of poppy farms for food crops is one that has been debated by much of the international world. We have known for years that sole eradication of illicit crops has never been the answer, and the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime presents that same idea in their report "Alternative Development: A Global Thematic Evaluation."
Additionally, the United Nations pointed out that:
"The United States, for example, provides 95 per cent of Peru’s alternative
development funds, but does not allow their use for alternative development “unlinked” to eradication."
The Wall Street Journal now states that the "Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living."
What is frustrating is that it has taken years for the U.S. to implement new policies that have more sustainable effects. But, thankfully, the U.S. now plans to leave their unsuccessful strategy of eradication behind.
Post new comment