THE POPPY PROBLEM

The United Nations drug agency wants "effective surgery" to eliminate
the "cancer" of opium production in Afghanistan. It's a bad analogy.

Poppy cultivation isn't a fire we can stamp out or a disease we can
cure. It's an industry. Economic laws created it, and economic laws
will determine its future.

In its World Drug Report 2007, the agency reports that drug production
in Afghanistan is at record levels. Nothing -- not the ban imposed by
the Taliban when they were in power, not the post-Taliban attempts to
change habits -- has been a permanent and countrywide solution. Why do
farmers persist in growing poppies?

In some areas, the answer is that it's just too difficult to stop. To
switch to wheat or vegetables requires secure access to legal markets,
as well as land and water. Where that access doesn't exist, it's
easier to grow and sell poppies. Poppy cultivation is
labour-intensive, so share-cropping is common -- that allows poor
families to get access to land. It's also an easy way to get credit:
Traders will give money upfront for a share of the next poppy harvest.

These points were made in a recent talk in Ottawa by David Mansfield,
a consultant who studies poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, and William
Byrd, an economist for the World Bank.

They warned, rightly, that unreasonable expectations in Afghanistan
will only lead to disappointment. Sure, we can wipe out crops -- but
opium grows fast, so the farmer who has a debt to pay off will likely
just grow more opium the next year to make up for one lost crop. Less
opium production means less income, which means the area gets poorer,
more desperate, more vulnerable to warlords and the Taliban. Razing
crops is not a way for the Afghan government and its allies to win
friends.

A smarter idea is the one put forward by the Senlis Council: License the
poppy farmers and buy their crops for the legal global medicine market. This
might have positive effects in some areas, but it's still not an overall
solution. Adding a legal buyer to the system wouldn't eliminate the demand
from the illegal market. Indeed, the added demand could raise the price and
encourage production.

The solution to Afghanistan's poppy problem begins and ends with
acknowledging that, as William Byrd puts it, "the drug industry is a
very strong, nimble private sector that will respond to measures
against it."

That might sound bleak, but an economic analysis actually leaves more
room for optimism than the curing-cancer analogy. Economies change.
Afghanistan itself has shown that farmers are happy to stop growing
poppies -- in parts of the country where they have real choices. The
more stable and diverse Afghanistan's economy becomes, the fewer
poppies will grow there. That can't happen overnight.

Of course, the market for opium is global, so it's likely that the
poppies that don't grow in Afghanistan will grow somewhere else. The
recent UN report says Afghanistan is the "exception" to the global
good news on the drug front -- but an economic analysis would suggest
the downward trend in other countries is related to the upward trend
in Afghanistan.

We ignore the laws of supply and demand at our peril, on the village
or the global scale.