Still Water Runs Deep: Illicit Poppy and the Transformation of the Deserts of Southwest Afghanistan
Publisher: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit and European Union
Author(s): David Mansfield
Date: 2018
Topics: Conflict Causes, Renewable Resources
Countries: Afghanistan
The physical and political geography of the deserts of southwest Afghanistan have gone through dramatic change over the last two decades. Located on the periphery of irrigated lands settled by the Afghan state in the 1950s and 1960s, this area has been at the forefront of technological change in Afghan agricultural production since 2003. Initially settled by small numbers of households escaping drought in the 1990s, large tracts of these former desert lands were then captured by local elites and their communities from the adjacent irrigated lands. With access to improved technologies, including deep wells and diesel pumps, and a buoyant opium price, dry rocky soils were transformed into viable agricultural land.
An added impetus for further encroachment and development of these former desert lands came in 2008 when the Afghan state—with the help of foreign military forces—coerced the rural population to abandon the opium crop in accessible irrigated areas. These counternarcotics efforts served to evict the land-poor from the provinces of Helmand, Farah and Kandahar, leaving them few options but to seek new lives in the former desert areas. For those that owned land in the former desert areas, this supply of relatively cheap labour skilled in opium production encouraged a further expansion in poppy cultivation, further increasing the total agricultural area and the economic value of their properties.
Even with repeated low yields between 2010 and 2014, and fluctuating prices, farmers in these former desert areas adapted and innovated, exploiting herbicides and solar technology from China to reduce opium production costs and further increase the amount of land under cultivation. As this paper argues, these former desert areas should not be seen as marginal and remote, but understood as engines of growth integrated into the global economic system; these are areas that have been transformed by improved access to technologies and an entrepreneurial population that has fully exploited the opportunities opium production has offered.