A Poppy Harvest in Helmand, Undeterred

Bay Ismoyo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Late May marks the end of the annual poppy harvest in Khan Neshin, a remote and thinly populated district in southernmost Helmand Province. First cleared by United States Marines in
2009, the district was one of nine in the province to be included in this year’s counternarcotics eradication campaign.

Government-led eradication is intended to go hand in hand with wheat-seed distribution. The goal is to offer farmers a viable alternative to the opium poppy that fuels the insurgency. But seed distribution programs
can have unintended consequences when they buy up all of an area’s best seed, effectively shutting out farmers who do not have access to distribution points. In backwater districts like Khan Neshin, where
the government has only one such point, they can discourage the cultivation of legal crops.

Eradication began here with a warning. In January, Helmand’s deputy provincial governor delivered a clear message to about 200 village elders assembled for a traditional shura meeting inside the centuries-old
mud walls of the district government center: stop growing poppies or face arrest and crop eradication. He was surrounded by officials who expounded upon the harmful consequences of poppy cultivation — violence,
instability, predatory trafficking, drug addiction.

It was a tough crowd. Most of the Afghans gathered for the counternarcotics shura had yet to receive even the most basic of services from their government. Some elders from outlying
villages were seeing a provincial official in the flesh for the first time. Why give up a lucrative cash crop for a government that offers so little in return?

Bay Ismoyo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This was a common refrain in conversations between Marines on foot patrol and the farmers they encountered during the winter planting season. While some pleaded ignorance of the poppy ban, others freely admitted to
growing the stuff. It was, they explained, the most profitable crop by a wide margin, and they had little expectation that the eradication law would be enforced by an absentee government. Besides, many had purchased
fertilizer and food in local market places on credit during the lean winter months, against a portion of their anticipated opium yield.

So it came as no surprise when the river valley erupted in patches of bright pink at the end of March. The distinctive poppy flower could be seen in all directions from the government center’s walls, in blatant
disregard of official warnings. Opium scoring tools were sold openly in the main bazaar, steps away from the district governor’s compound. Harvest season attracted hundreds of itinerant workers to the district;
they crowded the fields for the labor-intensive task of opium extraction.

To draw the poppy plant’s morphine-rich resin, these laborers cut tiny incisions in each of the thousands of bulbs that make up a mature poppy field. Left to dry in the sun, the milky secretion hardens into a
red gum before it is scraped from the bulb and collected in cakes of wet opium. According to United Nations estimates, Afghanistan’s raw opium is the basic ingredient in a chemical recipe that produces 89
percent of the world’s heroin.

District officials made good on some of their threats. In April, the Afghan police fanned out to destroy poppy fields before the harvest. Rather than cut individual plants by hand, they dragged wooden planks attached
with chains to pickup trucks and tractors, hoping to speed the process.

But they singled out only a small fraction of the district’s fields, and many of those fields were salvageable, as the poorly designed sleds merely flattened poppy plants without severing the stems. Worse, some
police officials were complicit in trafficking. When one Afghan Border Police commander was caught with hundreds of pounds of dry opium, he was quickly reassigned to another district. The opium disappeared with
him.

Even if the police wanted to eradicate all of the poppy fields in Khan Neshin, they wouldn’t have enough men for the job. The Afghan government has a presence in less than half of the 37-mile arable “green
zone” that the Helmand River cuts through this desert district. A survey of 45 randomly selected villages predicted only a slight decrease in Helmand’s opium production in 2011 — an estimate
that seems accurate if Khan Neshin is any indication. For now, poppy thrives in this remote corner of Afghanistan.

First Lt. Blake J. Rice served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps. He will begin studies for his M.B.A. at Harvard Business School in the fall. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Marine Corps, Department of Defense or the United States government.