strategies to counter opiate in Afghanistan - Groupe URD

2007, but also by the insecurity which prevails in the South and West where production is
concentrated. Nevertheless, 55% of the area eradicated in 2005 was in Helmand where
the security situation is unstable (UNODC, 2005).
A consensus is currently emerging between actors under the Afghan government’s
leadership. This has been made possible, amongst other things, by a change in the USA’s
counter-narcotics strategy since 2007. A review of U.S. counter-narcotics strategy carried
out by the Strategic Studies Institute for the U.S. government in 2007 concluded that: “the
current strategy disproportionately emphasizes and resources the eradication pillar at the
expense of the [U.S.] strategy’s other pillars. […] While eradication may seem like a quick
and easy fix, it is alienating small farmers while many of the largest drug traffickers,
kingpins, and corrupt officials in Afghanistan continue to prosper. With eradication getting
most of the attention and resources, the alternative livelihoods, interdiction, law
enforcement and justice reform, and public information pillars of the U.S. counternarcotics
strategy have been neglected, resulting in an ineffective counter-narcotics
program”. (Glaze J., SSI, 2007)
Eradication by means of chemical spraying has now been banned and eradication must
now be limited to the areas where farmers have clear alternatives to meet their needs. The
objective of eradication is to introduce a credible risk into opium poppy cultivation in
order to influence farmers’ decision-making and make them more reluctant to plant opium
poppy.
Eradication operations involve a number of difficulties:
• They require a great deal of resources either in terms of machinery (which is not
always easy to get to isolated areas), or in terms of labour (to destroy the harvest
manually). Furthermore, eradication needs to take place at a precise moment to be
effective and the window of opportunity only lasts two or three weeks.
• There is a great deal of corruption, such as the police (CNPA) taking bribes in
exchange for not reporting fields which could be eradicated. In a way, this acts as a
mechanism for redistributing wealth among the actors involved.
• The objective of making eradication a means of introducing risk into the decision
of whether or not to cultivate poppy does not appear to have been achieved: only 1% of all
the farmers interviewed by UNODC mentioned fear of eradication as a reason for not
cultivating opium, and only 2% of the farmers in the South (UNODC, 2009).
• The relations between eradication and compensation, and the political
implications of these are not easy to manage. The Afghan government and the members of
the international community involved in military operations in Marjah were faced with a
dilemma once the Taliban had been chased out of the area: it was full of opium poppy
fields about to reach maturation. To eradicate these fields was to run the risk of turning
the population against them. The US army decided to offer to pay the opium producing
farmers the price of their harvest if they destroyed the crop and replaced it with licit
crops. (Reuters, 21 mars 2010)
Strategies to counter opiate production in Afghanistan
Groupe URD | Juin 2010
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