Afghan Farmers: Why We Grow It

Gul Haidar smiled as he sifted some seeds through his fingers, happy he had planted the one crop that should ensure his family's welfare next year - opium poppies.

In pencil-thin, spiraling furrows dug with a homemade plow pulled by oxen, Haidar has sown the tiny, pale specks that will yield flowers in four months. When the petals fall, buyers will come for the seed pods and its opium resin.

The Pashto-speaking farmer expects to triple what he had made from the winter wheat he had planted the last three seasons.

With the Taliban no longer around to enforce a three-year ban on poppy-growing, hundreds of farmers near the eastern city of Jalalabad - their appetite for profit sharpened by years of drought and hardship - have resumed planting what they call "narcotic."

"We don't have much water, so with narcotic we make more money to offset the problem of the drought," Haidar said. "If you water twice a year, narcotic will do very well, but with wheat, you have to water nine times."

Miles of flat fields surround Jalalabad, with barren desert mountains visible in the distance. Hundreds of miles of irrigation canals funnel runoff from mountain springs and creeks onto the fields, but after three years without rain, water is precious.

The 75-year-old Haidar, who lives in a mud house, has rented his 750 acres from a wealthy Afghan for the past half-century.

Before the Taliban ban, he almost exclusively grew poppies. During the past three years, he switched to wheat rather than risk imprisonment. But Haidar had stashed a bag of poppy seeds - and brought them out when the Taliban fled Jalalabad this month, in time for planting season.

Now he has sown 250 acres of poppies, which he said will yield 650 pounds of opium.

"It will be just enough to live," Haidar said. "I have a family of 10, so I work just to live, eat and for clothes."

Afghanistan was once the world's largest opium producer, enough to supply 75 percent of the world's heroin, according to the U.N. Drug Control Program.

Farmers produced 3,611 tons from the 1999 planting. But after a ruthless Taliban crackdown, the crop in 2000 dropped to 204 tons, the agency said in July.

Most of the opium is exported and is rarely used locally.

Mujahed, a 42-year-old farmer who uses only one name, said buyers give him an advance so that he can buy fertilizer and survive until the crop comes in. They return during the annual harvest to buy his seed pods and take the opium to Pakistan, where, he says, "they make the stuff that is very bad."

"But we don't know about the advantages or disadvantages for other people," Mujahed said. "I don't know what they do with it. ... For me, there are a lot of advantages over wheat."

The U.N. drug program spent years working with the Taliban and aid agencies to discourage poppy growing and encourage wheat production. But farmers outside Jalalabad said they never saw any of the aid money that was funneled through the Taliban.

"The Weterners, when they want to help us, they should put the aid in our hands, not give it to the leaders," Mujahed said, adding that he would stop growing poppies if given an alternative.

But Kasim, a 65-year-old white bearded farmer, was less sympathetic.

"Our life is really very difficult, because we can't grow wheat and still survive," he said. "We need to grow narcotic, even if it is not fair to the rest of the world."

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