Afghanistan’s
Opium Production in Perspective
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy
CNRS-Prodig
www.geopium.org
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy is a geographer and Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
research fellow in Paris, France. He produces www.geopium.org.
Afghanistan’s
Opium Production in Perspective
Afghanistan has been the world’s primary
opium producing country since 1991, when it surpassed Burma
(Myanmar) in total annual production. Both the Taliban regime
and the Karzai government inherited an illicit drug economy
that has been stimulated by two decades of war and also fuelled
the country’s war economy. However, just as the Taliban
government successfully, but counterproductively, prohibited
opium production in 2001, their regime was toppled by U.S.
military intervention in response to the September 11 attacks
in the United States.
Then, in a rather chaotic
Afghanistan, opium production resumed and grew back to normal.
Now, the illicit drug economy in Afghanistan is said to fuel
terrorism. The Afghan government, the U.S.-led coalition and
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime consider that
"fighting drug trafficking equals fighting terrorism."(1)
However, in Afghanistan as
in other parts of the world, in Burma for example, opium has
long been at stake in armed conflicts as its trade has allowed
these conflicts to be prolonged. As the complex history of
opium in Asia demonstrates, opium production and trade have
been central to world politics and geopolitics for centuries
and the role of the opium economy in Afghanistan does not
represent a new trend. In many ways, history reinvents itself.
A Brief History of
Opium
Opium is one of the world’s oldest pain-relievers. It
is a narcotic drug that is obtained from the unripe seedpods
of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum L. It is difficult
to pinpoint the geographic area of origin of the opium poppy.
Although the oldest opium poppy capsules have been found in
Switzerland, the plant itself is thought to have originated
somewhere between the eastern Mediterranean and Minor Asia.
However, the opium poppy
has proven its ability to adapt to most ecological environments
and, thus, has spread across Europe and Asia, and, even to
the Americas, Australia and Africa. Very early on then, the
opium poppy grew around human settlements and has most likely
thrived in a symbiosis with early human activities along transcontinental
migration routes. Indeed, historically, human societies have
widely used opium as an analgesic and a sedative. Its cultivation
was also a way to finance empires, colonial ventures, and
wars.
It was not until the British
Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production
in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched
in the world economy. The opium produced in British India
was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging
globalization. Tea, which was then only grown in China, was
bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South
American mines. This triangular trade went on at least until
the British Empire, together with the East India Company it
had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first
through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports.
The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and
1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade
onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that
not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked,
in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history.
Eventually, opium consumption and addiction also spurred tremendous
opium production in China. In response to the Chinese national
consumption that drained its silver reserves, China became
the world’s foremost opium producer.
China did not succeed in
suppressing both national opium consumption and production
until after World War II. Opium production then moved to the
hills and mountains of Southeast Asia, where the so-called
Golden Triangle quickly became the primary opiumproducing
region in the world. As Alfred McCoy revealed in his 1972
seminal book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (reedited
in 1991 as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global
Drug Trade) (2), the Cold War clearly helped
the illicit opium-heroin economies thrive in Asia.
This trend emerged first
in Laos and in Burma, then in Afghanistan in what came to
be known as the Golden Crescent. In both Southeast and Southwest
Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Communist
covert operations and secret wars benefited from the participation
of some drug-related combat units or individual actors who,
to finance their struggles, were directly involved in drug
production and trade. To cite just two, the Hmong in Laos
and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan.
Opium Production in
Afghanistan (and Asia)
Today, Afghanistan’s opium production is the direct
outcome of Cold War rivalries and conflicts waged by proxies
who helped develop a thriving narcotic economy in the country.
Afghanistan has been the world’s leading opium-producing
country for years now, with Burma and Laos ranking second
and third respectively.
However, the spread of drug
trafficking in Asia and elsewhere is also clearly linked to
the international prohibition of certain drugs of which the
two most significant events occurred in 1961, when the United
Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was adopted, and
in 1971, when the administration of U.S. President Richard
Nixon declared a global “war on drugs.” However,
the U.S.-led push for global prohibition had unintended local
and regional consequences. In Iran for example, the 1955 prohibition
stimulated production in Afghanistan and Pakistan and even
in the distant Golden Triangle. Turkish prohibition of opium
production in 1972 spurred the Golden Crescent’s production
and further linked together Asia’s two main poppy-growing
areas.
After the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the illicit drug trade continued
to fuel Asian conflicts, and Afghanistan and Burma became
the world’s two main opium-producing countries. Their
national economies have now been affected for decades by an
illicit agriculture that, to some extent and in some areas,
grew detrimentally to food crops such as wheat and rice, even
though most farmers grow the opium poppy as a cash crop to
cope with extreme staple crops shortages. Various political
and economic factors have favored or still favor the resort
to the illicit drug economy in both countries: internal or
transnational conflicts, the disintegration of the state,
ethnic contentions, religious strife, oppressive regimes,
lack of economic development projects, low international prices
of food crops and droughts, just to name a few.
Illicit opium production
thrives on war economies and poverty. Impacts and consequences
of such economies vary according to time and location. Opium
production threatens alimentary self-reliance and subjects
growers to repression and even harsher life conditions. Trafficking
destabilizes producing and neighboring countries by stimulating
the corruption of authorities. Trafficking also spreads consumption
of opium and especially of heroin, both creating and increasing
drug addiction along trafficking routes, as is the case in
Central Asia and China. Production, trafficking and consumption
also nurture armed violence across international borders and
spread scourges such as the HIV-AIDS epidemic that is transmitted
by way of intravenous drug use in most of Asia.
Conclusions
Thus, illicit opium production can be assessed to be a national,
regional, and global problem. This problem is deeply rooted
in local as well as global histories and may only be addressed
in various and specific cultural, political and economic contexts.
However, any solution to the
problem of illicit drug production in Asia, as in the rest
of the world, has to be achieved through a global and coordinated
approach. If opium suppression is to be achieved, if it is
to be sustainable and not counterproductive, it has to be
implemented progressively, through use of a long run strategy,
as has happened in Pakistan and Thailand.
Afghanistan has suffered
two decades of war and economic and political disintegration.
Although the role of law enforcement is necessary to rid the
country of its drug economy, concrete results will not be
achieved without political stability and economic development.
It is only when these conditions exist that opium suppression
becomes possible in Afghanistan. This is to be achieved through
a broad program of alternative livelihood development, mainstreamed
into national development strategies.
Notes:
1 Antonio
Maria Costa, Executive Director of UNODC, Kabul, February
2004.
2 Alfred
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New
York, Harper & Row, 1972) and Alfred McCoy, The Politics
of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global
Drug Trade (1972; reprint 1991, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence
Hill Books, 1991).
