By Allison Brown
The common Counter Narcotics term is "carrot and stick" -- incentives to diversify out of illicit drugs linked to a real threat to of negative consequences for people who resist change. Experience shows that incentives and threats are necessary parts of a comprehensive supply reduction strategy and that they are effective in locations where cropping systems are not managed by gangsters with guns.
The recent announcement that the USA will no longer push eradication in Afghanistan is a welcome one. The previous administration applied the stick before the carrot was in sight. Targeting politically powerless and impoverished Afghan farmers made the Afghan population very unhappy with many negative follow-on effects that are described elsewhere.
While it is correct to put eradication on hold for now, the firm commitment to rational eradication must also be present if incentive programs are to work. The key word here is "rational".
For the past few years the British government working on a set of science-based metrics to determine when and where poppy eradication should be conducted. The criteria are based largely on the work of David Mansfield and others who have been documenting poppy cultivation patterns in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region for a long time. See Economic Incentives and Development Initiatives to Reduce Opium Production - a World Bank report by Christopher Ward, David Mansfield, Peter Oldham and William Byrd - one of the finest works to be found on this topic. (Also search here for a series of six reports that has become known as the "Drivers Report" report).
Mansfield and others following the same trail, identify criteria under which eradication can be said to be the morally correct course of action. The goal is to eradicate only where free farmers plant poppy in defiance of the law, knowingly and despite the availability of adequate alternative income potential. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult to score individuals and communities score on each of these measures.
The first and most obvious box to tick is the absence of coercion in the planting decision. That is a no brainer.
After that comes a series of more subjective measurements, made almost impossibly difficult by the absence of the means to measure anything in Afghanistan. Arial surveys and maps tell us a lot about the ground situation but they do not tell the whole story.
The criteria list looks something like this:
- Afghanistan has no land tenure or cadastral map systems. Does the person farming this particular piece of land have title to it or is he some kind of serf producing crops for some rich guy who lives in Dubai?
- Afghanistan has been suffering from drought for about 12 years. Does this farm have enough water resources to support diversified farming? (Poppy returns to water investment are among the highest.)
- Afghanistan has abysmal infrastructure. Does this community have sufficient infrastructure to develop markets for diversified crops?
- Afghanistan does not educate its citizens. Do these farmers have enough education resources to allow them to learn about new technologies and new markets?
- Agriculture information does not travel very far in Afghanistan. Has this community received enough info on markets and production technologies to diversify out of poppy?
And so on through the whole list of necessary and sufficient conditions to rural success:
- Stable, believable, effective government with fair laws, equitably enforced- Reliable, affordable electricity to support value adding activities
- Peace and security so that people may work in safety
- Credit and banking services to finance production inputs
- Business development services so that people can learn how to manage their investments and compete in regional markets
- Physical access to agriculture and manufacturing inputs
- Agriculture extension -- this last one does not exist anywhere in Afghanistan, which is another article
When a farm and farmer have reached a certain level on the prosperity scale and presuming that there is no coercion, then there is no excuse for planting poppy. The poppy fields can be destroyed without remorse and the action justified to the Afghan public and to the world at large.
The methodology is sound although not easy to use. Today there are few places where the UK is —to authorize eradication. But if development programs, especially rural electrification, go ahead on schedule (they have not so far, but we can hope), in about 15 years the entire country will be market ready. In the mean time, park the sprayers but keep them visible.
Allison Brown has over twenty-five years professional experience providing business development services to urban and rural development projects in developing economies. She is also a technical specialist on the use of agriculture and economic interventions in Counter Narcotics programs. Ms Brown in 2008 worked as the Counter Narcotics Advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Government of Afghanistan. In 2004-5 she was Team Leader of a worldwide impact evaluation of Alternative Development practices against drug crops for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Ms Brown served as a USAID staff officer in Sri Lanka from 1987-1990 the height of the civil war.
Comments
This is an excellent article. It highlights some of the complex issues revolving around poppy production and its replacement in the Afghan economy and culture. Where eradication is not feasible, the more workable approach may be diversion of poppy production to legitimate pharmaceutical markets within a structured "co-op" system. I once read that the requirement for legitimate use of "pain medication", ie morphine, etc. was only being met in something like 1/4 of the world. Most undeveloped countries have woefully inadequate pain mitigation options for surgeries, etc. What makes more sense than eradication is exploitation of the resource to meet a real world need.