WHY NOT BUY AFGHAN POPPY CROPS?

Last Week in Ottawa There Was a Conference Outlining the Current
Situation in Afghanistan.

One of the primary reports was tabled by the independent Senlis
Council headed by president-founder Norine MacDonald.

For the past 14 months, MacDonald has lived and worked in the
Kandahar region where her council has monitored the progress of
international development efforts.

Despite the obvious security risks, the Senlis team live among the
Afghans and do not operate with military escorts.

As such, they are one of the very few foreign agencies still
providing an insight into this Taliban-infested hostile corner of Afghanistan.

One of the recommendations put forward by Senlis is admittedly
neither a new suggestion nor a novel proposal. It simply echoes those
made by a number of other think tanks that call upon the
international community to purchase the Afghan poppy crops rather
than trying to eradicate them.

At the moment, poverty and unemployment are plaguing Afghanistan's
recovery and the only growth industry is the rampant illegal drug trade.

Estimated to be worth $3 billion annually, opium sales constitute
over 60 per cent of the Afghan economy and drug dealers employ about
80 per cent of the workforce.

The U.S. has determined that this glut of narcotics must be
eliminated from the world market and already its military forces have
been actively involved in wiping out the poppy fields.

Deprived of their livelihood, the Afghan farmers have proven to be
eager recruits for the insurgency.

What Senlis (and others) propose is that, instead of destroying the
poppies, we should encourage their cultivation and purchase the crops
at fair market value. These plants can then be used to produce
legitimate pharmaceuticals that could provide affordable drugs for
Third World consumers.

It should be remembered that the Afghan farmers are producers not
consumers of these narcotics, so they are not going to be concerned
about what final product results from their crop sales.

The key to preventing the poppies from ending up as street drugs is
to simply control the harvest timing.

There are only a few days in the growth cycle during which the sap
flows freely through the stem. It is at this point that the opiates
can easily be extracted and turned into street drugs.

This short harvest window is why the poppy-pickers are the highest
paid agricultural workers in all of central Asia and it explains why
the schools around Kandahar are cleared of students at this time
because everyone is out harvesting poppies.

Should the sap be allowed to harden in the stems, the opiate
extraction process is far more difficult and requires specialized
equipment. This is generally how pharmaceutical companies produce
such painkillers as codeine and morphine.

Through the use of aerial observation of controlled crops, it is
theoretically possible to delay the poppy harvest until the plant
reaches this more inert state and thus turns the crop into a
legitimate product.

At the moment, the American eradication process is not offset with
any cash subsidies for the farmers.

This leaves the Afghans without any means of income and dependent
upon foreign aid handouts to survive.

Thus, the same foreign coalition soldiers who are destroying their
crops are also tasked with handing out a meagre sustenance.

Understandably, many of the poppy growers have chosen instead to join
the insurgency.

The increased violence has reduced the flow of relief supplies even
further and, in turn, the Afghan villagers suffering has increased.

Despite the fact that the Senlis poppy purchase makes a lot of sense,
there are those in the Canadian military community who believe that
any suggestion of a policy change is an attack against "the mission."
They believe that "staying the course" means barreling down a path
clearly marked as "impending disaster."

As such, the Senlis proposal had barely been tabled before the
tub-thumping colonel blimps jumped into the fray to denounce the
whole idea as poppycock.

Clever quip aside, the main thrust of the old officers argument was
that buying poppies directly from farmers would deny the druglords
their profitable little empires.

The street cost of the poppies would be just $760 million, which
would cut about $2.3 billion out of Afghanistan's black market.

These are great numbers, but one has to ask why it's necessary to
eliminate the existing supply hierarchy?

Obviously, in Canada we don't buy our medicine directly from farmers.
To do so would certainly cut into the profitable little empires of
the pharmaceutical companies.

I suggest that instead of calling them "druglords" we call the Afghan
suppliers "pharmaceutical executives" and turn the black market into
free enterprise.

To keep the dollar figures in perspective, the U.S. and coalition
forces are presently spending more than $20 billion annually on
military operation in Afghanistan. By that scale, paying $3 billion
to stabilize the enemy and eliminate the illegal drug trade seems
like quite a bargain.