As Afghanistan has recently taken the mantle as the world’s single greatest supplier of opium and heroin, it might be a nice idea to look at why they actually came to this esteemed position. We have heard a lot of how Afghan farmers produce poppies as other cash crops return a tenth of the income, but how did things actually get so bad?
For point of comparison it should be remembered that in 1978 Afghanistan was agriculturally self sufficient!
But then came the coup of 1978 and soon after that the invasion by the USSR.
Invasions never do great things for the economy of the country on the receiving end. Years of war combined with what amounted basically to a scorched earth policy by the Russians left Afghanistan with a crumbling infrastructure. The Ruskis blowing up stuff that is used for economic production was Afghanistan’s first problem.
With the invasion came also the massive exodus of people as refugees. The skilled ones ended up dispersed all over the world. And there lies their next problem. Generating an alternative means of wealth creation for a country is a very difficult task when the people qualified to lead that rebuilding now reside happily on the other side of the world. Skills shortage is a massive understatement.
With the Russians gone, the ongoing wars and counter wars never really stopped. This is after all, a country ruled primarily by warlords with their own more-or-less independent fiefdoms and matching armies. The Taliban added to the mess and the fighting continued. Meanwhile those skilled refugees were starting to make a little cash in their newly adopted countries. Who would want to return home to a continuing civil war?
Oh, then there’s the drought. A pretty big one actually. When an acre of poppy plants was getting the same return at market as 10 acres of other cash crops but you only hada tenth of the water, which do you think would have been the better alternative?
While the US invasion had the support of most of the world, it still was an invasion and people usually don’t like returning home to a country in the middle of a war. Meanwhile those Afghan refugees living abroad are getting fat and rich in other countries. Things still haven’t settled down since the US invasion and many parts of the country are unstable. Expecting those refugees to give up their comfortable lives in favour of a wild-west scenario is unrealistic.
In all of this, you have unskilled farmers in an area where only the strongest survive. The strongest, in this case have both guns and a little cash to throw around in bribes to let them get their product out of the country. With nobody left to teach improved methods of agriculture and with tough guys offering a premium for a poppy crop, most farmers simply don’t have the skills or means to do much else.
Continued invasions and war leading to massive instability in which criminal elements can thrive combined with a massive exodus of people and corresponding skills shortage in a time of continued droughts means that there aren’t a lot of opportunities for an uneducated Afghan farmer.
And so we have a problem.