Daughters given up to pay opium debts:
The fight against the destructive drug cycle will be long, as farmers fall farther behind in repaying their loans..
by Anthony Loyd, The Times - London
August 7, 2004 "Ottawa Citizen " -- Haji Nek Muhammed, the chief of Naghlou, a village in Afghanistan's opium-rich Nangarhar province, remains tight-lipped, in an awkward silence designed to preserve the Pashtun code of honour.
Then he decides to explain just how small-time poppy farmers pay off their loans to the opium traders. "First the farmer would hand over his land," he begins quietly. "If that's not enough then, well, then you are supposed to give away your daughter to the man."
Haji Mohammed, 45, was the first opium grower to admit to the extent of misery affecting the country's opium farmers, more than half of whom are believed to be caught in a cycle of debt that is seen as a major reason for this year's record level of poppy cultivation. British and Afghan counter-narcotics officials have corroborated his version of events.
"We got the first reports of women being traded to pay off opium debts from Badakhshan earlier this year," said Mohammed Ghaws, the director of the British-organized Counter-Narcotic Directorate (CND) in Jalalabad. "Then we heard about it in Nangarhar too. There are many cases whereby indebted farmers who couldn't repay were forced to give over their daughters instead."
Popular imagination sees the opium poppy as a get-rich-quick crop that reaps huge rewards for all involved before causing misery and hardship to those on the using end of the business. This understanding has produced much criticism of Britain's lead in supporting the Afghan counter-narcotics strategy, which includes $170 million funding over three years.
Yet the reality is very different. The vast majority of poppy farmers own less than a hectare of land, are every bit as trapped in necessity and poverty as the addicts at the end of the equation and are part of a hugely complex problem for which there is no quick fix.
Haji Muhammed's description of the cycle is concise. War has ruined the irrigation systems in Nangarhar, a problem compounded by drought so that the hardy poppy has a natural advantage over other water- intensive crops. A small-time sharecropping farmer, a dekhan, is thus drawn to the appeal of planting poppy, which may produce as much as 75 kilos of opium per hectare, selling at a price up to $300 a kilo, a profit far above anything that can be gained from wheat or maize.
The opium trader lends the dekhan money in advance to cover his costs for the November to April poppy season. But if they can't produce far more than their debt, they fall behind.
As there is to date no effective government loan scheme in Nangarhar for poor sharecroppers to plant alternative crops they are easily drawn into the poppy scheme.
Most have been in serious debt since April 2000 when the Taliban, which initially allowed poppy cultivation, suddenly eradicated the crops just before harvest. The poppy farmers have slipped further and further into the mire, borrowing more and more in the hope of a good harvest. But in spite of the increased level of cultivation, disease has blighted much of the crop over the past two years, leading to a slump in the market and further debt.
Warlords remain the dominant power in most districts and the envisaged demobilization, disarmament and reintegration program designed to erase militias has stalled.
Corruption at provincial level is endemic. The nascent judicial system has yet to include a specialist narcotics prosecutor.
Counter-narcotics police and eradication units, as well as an Afghan Special Narcotics Force, are in the process of being trained but are yet few in number. And in the absence of a viable economy for farmers to grow alternative crops, so far poppy eradication has been limited for fear of a backlash against the government of Hamid
Karzai.
Copyright "The Times"
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