Make-Work and Counternarcotics

I have to question anyone’s expertise who advocates this:

Or better yet, subsidize factories that pay weekly wages to absorb poppy workers. Who would choose stoop labor in distant poppy fields over comfortable conditions working alongside friends and family members? What does it matter, really, if there is nothing that the Afghans can make that anyone wants? Subsidizing make-work is cheaper monetarily and politically than fighting and over time builds a skilled workforce.

That’s Allison Brown, the former Counter Narcotics Advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Government of Afghanistan, writing in the Small Wars Journal. (I wonder if people working at the Ministry of Counternarcotics would think differently?)

I seem to recall previous make-work programs in Afghanistan ending in complete disaster. The reason? For one, factories are not “comfortable,” no matter how much you try to sell it. For another, most opium farmers already work their own small patch of land (the challenge in opium cultivation isn’t the temporary workers, but the thousands of small farmers who own the land it grows on). Lastly, Afghans are not stupid, and they do not appreciate being condescended to—no matter how much you pay them, making them do busywork will not address the issue, nor will it actually build up any skills.

As my friend Joel Hafvenstein related to me last year:

the opium trade is organically connected to government officials at every level, who can be expected to resist any serious attempts to reduce their profits. The anti-Taliban governors and police chiefs in the north and east who have cracked down on poppy cultivation continue to profit handsomely from trafficking routes. Or take Sher Muhammad of Helmand, from the Costa quote you cited, who is related by marriage to the Karzais and was demoted from governor to senator at British insistence after 9 tons of opium were discovered in his office. Since his ouster, he has allegedly been encouraging the skyrocketing levels of poppy cultivation and violence in the province, to strengthen the case that only his family can control the place. Karzai has reportedly been arguing with the British to reinstate him over the last few months.

Woops. Now, Ms. Brown is right that opium is one of the only viable crops in the south, but she also misses two critical factors: credit, and conflict. A big credit challenge for opium farmers—small farmers make up the majority of cultivate opium—is that opium traders are often the only source of micro-credit. Because of how opium price cycles work, these micro-credit structures often trap farmers in permanent debt cycles (and, contra Ms. Brown, that phenomenon is not limited to the south, and has resulted in families in supposedly-safe Nangarhar selling off their own children to repay debts).

Then, there is conflict. The popular narrative about opium is that it drives conflict: “this area grows poppy, therefore it is unsafe.” That is the opposite of reality, a post hoc ergo propter hoc viewpoint akin to arguing wet streets cause rain. For many years, this site has argued opium cultivation is a trailing indicator of conflict issues in Afghanistan, not a cause of them. For successful opium cultivation, you must first have insecurity and no rule of law. A new paper (pdf) from the University of Oslo argues this nicely:

We emphasize a reverse mechanism, what we call conflict-induced narcotics production. It rests on more fragmented power where local producers and leaders react to military activities by raising drug production; not because they want to hoard cash to buy arms, but because the production decisions reflect a new social and economic situation, and a shorter time horizon. In the case of Afghanistan, the key is the observation that opium cultivation requires a minimum of investments and provides a maximum of economic turnover. These are desirable features under the political instability generated by conflict…

The factors (a) destruction of infrastructure (lower kt ), (b) confidence in local protection and low fear of external law enforcement (higher θt ), and (c) political instability (higher γ ) al l lead to a rise in opium production, irrespective of land ownership and of who decides what crop to cultivate.

Indeed. That paper is very mathy and theoretical, and I’m not certain I’m sold on their specific choice of model, but it is nevertheless a compelling attempt to model why farmers actually grow opium. Ms. Brown skirts this issue when she writes that farmers need peace and local stability first, but seems to bury that under the weight of all these other factors—including a rather silly make-work program—that don’t really get at the root of the problem.

Tagged as: Afghanistan