Farmers scrape opium from poppy bulbs during the spring harvest in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on April 4, 2022.BRYAN DENTON/The New York Times News Service
Ruchi Kumar is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers conflict, politics and gender. From 2014 to 2021, she reported out of Kabul.
For nearly three decades, Afghanistan had been among the world’s leading producers of opium; at one point, it contributed nearly 90 per cent of the global supply. In the two decades since the start of the U.S.-led mission to oust the Taliban, several expensive attempts at counter-narcotic operations, costing upward of US$9-billion, made little difference in reducing production of opium poppies, the key source for highly addictive substances such as heroin.
But eight months after seizing control of Afghanistan in August, 2021, the Taliban issued a ban on the cultivation, production and trafficking of all forms of illicit narcotics – and that 2022 decree yielded phenomenal results. Within the year, the UN Office of Drug and Crime (UNODC) reported a 95-per-cent decrease in opium-poppy cultivation. According to the geographical data analysis platform Alcis, satellite imagery of Afghan provinces known to be large poppy cultivators, such as Helmand in the south and Badakhshan in the north, revealed a drop from 202,000 hectares in 2022 to 16,000 hectares in 2023 – and below 4,000 hectares in 2024. The poppy crop was either replaced with wheat, which led to a small increase in food production, or left fallow.
However, despite this seemingly resounding success, neither the analysts nor the Afghan farmers are celebrating yet. While the Taliban is taking punitive measures against farmers who violate the ban, its administration has done little to offer alternative opportunities for them to make money. Meanwhile, water-management experts have raised concerns over the continued sustainability of farmers switching over to cultivating wheat. While wheat is crucial for tackling Afghanistan’s food-insecurity crisis, the crop requires significantly larger quantities of water, as opposed to poppies, which are drought-resistant.
Afghanistan has grappled with severe climate shocks in recent years, which have significantly affected the farming community. While data from the country are hard to procure, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency estimated that temperatures there have risen by as much as 1.8 C between 1950 and 2010 – approximately twice the global average. Even though Afghanistan’s contribution to global carbon emissions has been minimal, its rising temperatures have affected precipitation and water resources.
The country has seen prolonged and repeated droughts since 2021, often followed by disastrous floods. In just the past three months alone, flooding across the northern and eastern provinces has caused significant damage to human life, livestock and more than 10,000 acres of farmland. This, coupled with a lack of water and irrigation infrastructure, means that farmers cultivating wheat or other water-intensive food crops are unable to make enough money to survive, threatening the stability of the Taliban’s opium ban.
What’s more, the ban does not apply to existing stockpiles of opium, which has only bumped up the value of the crops that were harvested before the law was implemented, leading to hoarding and increased demand. According to a number of sources verified by international agencies, the value of a kilogram of opium has soared from US$400 to as much as US$1,100 at its peak, making it a lucrative risk that farmers facing failing crops might be willing to take.
The fragility of the opium ban has been evident. In May, two Afghans were killed in Badakhshan during protests that broke out over the prohibition.
Afghan climate experts continue to advocate for more international aid so that Afghans, particularly the agrarian communities, can adapt to climate change by developing and maintaining key water management infrastructure. However, the current model of aid support for Afghans largely focuses on the humanitarian crisis and not on development, which leaves a significant gap in building climate resilience there. It also does not help that Afghans continue to be left out of global conversations on climate change because of the Taliban’s pariah status.
At the same time, it is also imperative to help Afghanistan’s agrarian community, particularly landless and low-income farmers, shift to alternative cash crops, or engage in sustainable alternatives to agriculture.
It has been three years since the Taliban took over, and their lack of governance along with crippling international sanctions on what was already an aid-dependent country, has resulted in vast and deep poverty affecting nearly the entire population.
In such a scenario, the progress that the Taliban has achieved in counternarcotics not only remains precarious, but also threatens security across borders. If the success of the narcotics ban is to be preserved, it needs to be reaffirmed through international efforts, particularly in the form of development support to Afghans in building agricultural and climate resilience.