From the helicopter, you can see the empty fields of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand River valley. Now comes the question: When the fields are lush again in spring, will farmers be growing opium poppy or wheat?
“This year we want to reach a minimum reduction of at least 50 percent,” said Gulab Mangal, Governor of Helmand, Afghanistan’s main opium-growing province and the most violent front in the Afghan war. “There is a very strong link between opium growing and the Taliban — the drug dealers are helping Taliban by buying weapons and ammunition for them.”
Once known as the bread basket of Afghanistan, the lush green irrigated fields of Helmand are the world’s single largest source of opium. The US sent 10,000 Marines to the province this year, joining a similar-sized British force.
PHOTO: REUTERS
They simultaneously launched the two biggest military offensives of the eight-year-old war, aiming to drive out Taliban fighters from the opium lands.
Meanwhile, the Westerners and the Afghan government are trying to persuade farmers to switch to other crops.
“They send us help and their sons to sacrifice their lives and we send them opium. We should be grateful and use their resources better,” Mangal said of the Western aid.
The economics of the opium trade have helped efforts to fight it this year. Partly because of past failures to combat it, there is now a global glut of opium, which has sent its price falling.
The UN said a hectare planted with opium in Afghanistan produced just three times as much cash value as the same land planted with wheat this year, compared with 27 times as much value a few years ago. UK experts say any economic advantage of producing opium may have been eliminated altogether.
In what Western governments describe as a major success, farmers cultivated poppy on a third less land in Helmand this year than last year, the UN said.
Nevertheless, Helmand’s farmers achieved record yields where the drug was planted, still managing to produce more than half of the world’s illegal opium in the province. As part of an effort to reduce Taliban influence and funding, Mangal and his US and UK backers hope farmers will plant wheat instead. The UK has spent US$15 million to provide wheat seed to nearly 70,000 farmers last year and this year.
Most farmers have to make do with 24th-generation wheat seed available on the local market, which has poor yields and little pest resistance. The new scheme will provide farmers with first-generation seed at a fraction of the market rate, plus fertilizer and technical assistance.
Trucking the wheat out to eight of Helmand’s 13 districts is no mean feat. Several of the brightly painted trucks loaded high with seed sacks and escorted in convoys have been ambushed, hit by bombs, crashed on the tough roads or disappeared without trace. Some areas are still waiting for their wheat to arrive.
The British military call Mangal a “bullet-magnet” for the risks he takes when going out to hold meetings in rural districts. During a meeting with elders in Sangin in the north of the province, insurgents shelled the gathering for 90 minutes.
Sporting Prada sunglasses and a suit jacket over his flowing clothes, the governor wandered through the center of Nad Ali district west of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah.
Despite regular rocket attacks, the town has come to life in recent months, a sign of security improvements since July’s simultaneous US operation Strike of the Sword and British Operation Panther’s Claw to the north and south.
Last year the main shopping street — a few dusty strips — was empty. Now about 300 stalls ply their wares in the bazaar. Shoes dangle from wooden struts, outsize weighing scales stand waiting for produce, and spare parts and mobile phone credit sellers lazily drink green tea together on wheeled-wooden carts.
In a half-built police station, Mangal implored elders to give up opium as a way of ensuring violence does not return.
“Almost one-and-a-half years ago this village was under control of the Taliban,” he told hundreds of bearded men who sat barefoot on red rugs. “With the end of the opium, the corruption, the killing, the insurgency — everything will stop.”
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