The Taliban’s Opium Ban Is Working. But It Could All Still Fall apart

Aug 15, 2024 | Ruchi Kumar
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For nearly three decades, Afghanistan had been among the world’s leading producers of opium; at one point, it contributed nearly 90 per cent of the global supply. In the two decades since the start of the U.S.-led mission to oust the Taliban, several expensive attempts at counter-narcotic operations, costing upward of US$9-billion, made little difference in reducing production of opium poppies, the key source for highly addictive substances such as heroin. But eight months after seizing control of Afghanistan in August, 2021, the Taliban issued a ban on the cultivation, production and trafficking of all forms of illicit narcotics – and that 2022 decree yielded phenomenal results. Within the year, the UN Office of Drug and Crime (UNODC) reported a 95-per-cent decrease in opium-poppy cultivation. According to the geographical data analysis platform Alcis, satellite imagery of Afghan provinces known to be large poppy cultivators, such as Helmand in the south and Badakhshan in the north, revealed a drop from 202,000 hectares in 2022 to 16,000 hectares in 2023 – and below 4,000 hectares in 2024. The poppy crop was either replaced with wheat, which led to a small increase in food production, or left fallow.