Afghanistan's opium tradeA nice little earner – for everyone
For over 25 years, Afghanistan has been the world’s main cultivation area of opium poppies and the primary supplier of opium, heroin, morphine and other opiates. In the past year, the country’s total cultivation area for opium poppies grew by 63 % to 328,000 hectares, thereby achieving a new record. The southern provinces of Kandahar, Uruzgan and Helmand are the centres of production.
Figures concerning cultivation and production vary from year to year, but that has less to do with targeted political interventions in the drug sector than with occasionally unfavourable weather. Trade dynamics matter too. As every free market, the drug market responds to supply and demand. If supply is abundant, prices drop. In order to put a check on volatility, supply needs to be limited.
Smuggling cartels and distributors thus keep opium in reserve in hidden storage facilities, creating artificial shortages. According to estimates, the total amount of opium in storage is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes. Because opium does not spoil, smuggling networks are free to manipulate supply at any time. Moreover, new substances with different combinations of opiates are constantly being developed in order to stimulate demand.
Because of the record harvest of 2017, experts estimate that approximately 7,600 to 7,900 tonnes of opium can currently be processed into heroin, so a record amount could soon flood the global drug market. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) believes that about 550 to 900 tonnes of heroin with a very high purity of 50 to 70 % will be available globally this year. However, prices are expected to be high. Especially in the lucrative western European markets, the rule of thumb is: the higher the degree of purity, the higher the price for a gramme of heroin.
Up to a third of Afghanistanʹs economic output
In Afghanistan, the drug sector has been estimated to be worth between $ 4.1 billion and $ 6.6 billion, which would amount to about 20 % to 32 % of the country’s gross domestic product in 2017. One year earlier, the share was a mere seven percent. In 2017, about 354,000 people were working full-time in the drug business, which also employed many part-timers and occasional workers.
The difference in profits between opium cultivation and the cultivation of legal crops like wheat, rice, corn or tomatoes has decreased significantly. Nevertheless, farmers stick to growing opium because they expect prices to stay stable. Money can be earned not only through cultivation and harvesting. There are also jobs in the transport, trade and chemical processing of opiates.
Agriculture dominates Afghanistan’s rural areas with weak infrastructure and a considerable share of the people depends on poppy cultivation and drug production. In the western and northern regions, poppies are cultivated in about a third of all villages, in the west in over half and in the south in almost 85 %. Drug cultivation provides not only farmers with secure incomes, but also many day labourers, migrant workers and former refugees returning from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, for example.
