A drug on the market

The Economist . 27 February 2002

A report from a United Nations body has added to mounting worries about an upsurge in heroin trafficking, following the downfall of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. The Taliban imposed a largely effective ban on the cultivation of the opium poppy, from which heroin is derived. But Afghan farmers are now planting poppies again.

NEITHER individual Afghans nor foreign governments have cause to mourn the collapse of the Taliban regime. But in one respect, it is already being missed abroad if not at home: it managed to eradicate most of Afghanistan's cultivation of the opium poppy. Now the Taliban are defeated, the country may once again reclaim the dubious honour of being the world's biggest producer, and the dominant force in the world heroin trade. Rival South-East Asian producers are now scrambling to beat them to market. Police and customs forces throughout Central Asia and Europe are bracing themselves for an influx of cheap heroin, and the United Nations (UN) International Narcotics Control Board, in its annual report, published on Tuesday February 26th, appealed for international action “to assist Afghanistan in preventing the resumption of illicit opium poppy cultivation.”

In 1999, Afghanistan produced four-fifths of all the illicit opium grown in the world. It was the source for almost all the heroin used in neighbouring countries, perhaps as much as 80% of that sold on the streets of Western European countries, and up to 90% of the market in some, such as Britain. But in September 1999, the Taliban issued a decree ordering all poppy farmers to cut the area under cultivation by a third. In fact, the actual reduction achieved was probably only about a tenth. But, coupled with a severe drought the next year, it had the effect of bringing total production down by 28%.

But in post-Taliban Afghanistan, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggesting that opium production will surge again: in many areas, though spring has barely begun, large poppy fields can be seen; customs forces in neighbouring countries such as Tajikistan have already made large seizures of heroin—which the INCB blames on the release of stocks stored through the war. Askar Akayev, the president of Kirgizstan, has said he expects “a huge influx” of heroin, as this year's harvest is processed in a few months' time.

There are a number of reasons why the opium poppy proved such a popular crop in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, and why fears that it will reassert itself are well-founded. Opium has been cultivated and consumed for centuries in Afghanistan—though only during the war that began in 1979 did it become such an important crop. Second, other countries in the region, such as Iran, after the Islamic revolution in 1979, Turkey and Pakistan, eliminated much poppy production. Third, the war led to the degradation of other forms of agriculture, as well as of most economic infrastructure. It also generated a demand for weapons from various warring factions, for whom heroin was a way of financing arms purchases, especially in the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet occupation led American and other supporters of Afghan mujahideen to turn off the financial tap.

Most important, the war led to a breakdown of central government control, so that, even had the government in Kabul wanted to stop heroin production, it did not have the means to do so. The fear now is that that describes precisely the predicament of the interim Afghan administration led by Hamid Karzai. An uneasy coalition of returned royalist exiles and the armed opposition to the Taliban, it relies on the support of local warlords and power-brokers. It has, as yet, few police or soldiers of its own, and Mr Karzai has been rebuffed in his requests for a larger foreign peacekeeping force with a mandate that extends beyond Kabul. He does not have the resources to enforce what would be an extremely unpopular ban on opium cultivation. For many farmers trying to rebuild their lives after so many years of warfare, this is the cash-crop of choice.

In some places, efforts have been made to curb production: in Kandahar, the Taliban's stronghold in the south, and centre of a big poppy-growing area, the government held a public bonfire of opium earlier this month, and closed down the city's opium bazaar, which had survived the Taliban. But it seems that, even there, the market has simply moved rather than shut up shop.

News of these developments has not been lost on other opium producers, notably those in the “Golden Triangle” area that straddles Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Even though it is the dry season, not the usual time of year to be planting opium, farmers in Myanmar have been using irrigation on a massive scale to raise the crop. They have been attracted by one consequence of the Taliban's drug policy: a price surge. Raw opium, at about $900 per kilo in the region now, is twice the price it was last summer. In Afghanistan, according to the UN, farm-gate prices for fresh opium were about $300 per kilo last year—a tenfold increase over prices in 2000. They have risen even further since.

Of course, if there is a big harvest this year in Afghanistan, prices will fall again. That is another reason for producers—including those in Myanmar—to hurry to bring their crop to market. This is an alarming prospect for countries dealing with the medical, social and political costs of wide-scale heroin addiction. Even those who argue that this is a problem that can only be solved by curbing demand, rather than by abortive efforts to cut off supply, have cause to worry: whatever the strategy for cutting demand, tumbling prices do not help.