Afghan farmers increased their production of opium poppy in 2022, despite the legal vagueness established by the Taliban who prohibited the plant in April before being deducted.
Le Monde
In Afghanistan, the cultivation of opium poppy increased by 32 % over a year, according to the first report on the subject since taking power by the Taliban in August 2021, published Tuesday October 31 by the UN. “It now reaches 233,000 hectares”, alerts the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime (ONUDC), noting that the prices of opium “have gone” since the Taliban has prohibited the planting of the flower in April 2022.
This year’s harvest was largely exempt from the decree. Afghan farmers must now decide in early November if they plant opium poppy for next year without knowing if the authorities will apply the ban, explains the organization based in Vienna, Austria.
They are “trapped in the illicit economy of opiates”, according to the executive director of the ONUDC, Ghada Waly, cited in a press release, who calls on the international community to “intensify interventions”. >
Afghanistan is by far the world’s leading world producer, from which opium is extracted as heroin and “income drawn by farmers from the sale of opium tripled” in one year, estimates the Onudc. Stone from 430 million euros in 2021 to 1.4 billion euros in 2022, it is the “more profitable recorded for years” and represents 29 % of the country’s total agricultural value, compared to 9 % a year earlier .
between 80 % and 90 % of global opium
However, the increase in income did not necessarily result in purchasing power, because inflation has skyrocketed during the same period, the price of foodstuffs increasing an average of 35 %, says the oneudc.
The seizures of opiates in the border countries of Afghanistan indicate that the traffic of opium and Afghan heroine has not stopped. Between 80 % and 90 % of heroin and opium worldwide comes from Afghanistan, mainly from the southwest of the country, according to the UN.
The culture of the flower had been briefly prohibited in 2000 by the Taliban, a few months before the fundamentalist regime was overthrown by the international coalition in reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
During their twenty years of guerrilla warfare against foreign forces, the Taliban then heavily taxed poppy producers in the regions under their control, this culture thus becoming an important source of income for them. The United States and NATO allies then tried to encourage peasants to produce wheat or saffron. Initiatives that failed, while the Taliban controlled the main production zones of poppy.