If poppies can grow all over the world, why is it that opium production is so heavily concentrated in Afghanistan?
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Can’t speak for most nations. But I know it’s pretty easy to spot with aerial/drone surveillance in developed nations. It’s not exactly subtle or space effective. It generates significant heat pockets if attempted indoors (makes rooftops or basement windows poop off significant heat in IR scans when it’s cold outside)
I could grow 5k of poppies with significant tell tale risk and work, or I can almost automate the production of a few thousand of shrooms in a 3x3x2 box in my closet with no known visable risks.
Just about value/output vs risk for me when I looked at it.
Most of life happens in opponent processing activities (someone wants to stop us). Bribing the opposition away makes it becomes part of cultural norms. Just an accepted cost of doing business in the industry in a region.
Now I know the Taliban banned opium a bit back. Haven’t looked at if it changes the numbers. They probably lack an enforcement mechanism and/or public will to follow through. That’s a culture battle at this point–could swing either way the next few years.
It’s legal, not ecological. Most other nations actively work to stop or heavily control the production of certain drugs. Afghanistan has a significant portion of their economy based around poppy growth and opium/heroin. Many government officials make quite a lot of money from the drug industry. So there isn’t anyone around stopping them, its a relatively easy way for the populace to make some money, and there is a significant global demand (legal and illegal).
Farming is hard in Afghanistan. Really hard.
Poppies are very drought resistant and the seeds are ready to transport. That makes a more reliable source of income compared to other crops, so many farmers had at least a portion of land attributed to growing poppies.
Afghanistan is big, rural, and poorly controlled even by the Taliban. So that gives rise to people growing poppies because it’s better than other crops, more likely to pay them well, and the Taliban themselves see it as a source of income.
However all is not as it once was. The Taliban recently outlawed production again, right in the middle of a harvest. It’s doubtful that there will be quite as much grown over the coming years.
Simply put, it’s not a very efficient business model. The production of profitable amounts of opium from poppies requires massive fields and massive labor. So Afghanistan simply had the right factors to spawn the industry.
1) the weak and corruptible central government meant that they could grow the required amount of flowers to make a profit without fear of regulation
2) the international connections of the criminal/terrorists meant they had an easy way to sell it
3) those terrorist organizations were in need of money
4) Afghan farmers were used to hard work for low pay so the cost of their labor was cheap.
(Edit: changed “Afghani” to “Afghan” after several people pointed out my typo.)
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ELI5 What are the ideal growing conditions for the poppy plant?
There are lots of great answers already. Back in the 1990s I lived in Pakistan, was friends with a guy who worked to avoid drug smuggling into the U.K., and was lucky to get a permit to travel into the tribal territories almost up to the Afghan border.
1 The opium poppy grows well in bad conditions. Better than other other cash or subsidence crops, and the Afghan climate is harsh; arid, cold winters hot summers.
2 The transport out of the area is hard, you need something high value and low weight because the infrastructure is poor and thieving and banditry high.
3 Incentives to get farmers using other crops have a high failure rate. The grants and subsidies, funds for fertilisers and modernising farming techniques get skimmed so badly that they rarely get to the farmers that need them.
To boil it down entirely to the economic question, it is a case of comparative advantage.
Consider as a metaphor hunting and fishing. Suppose for a moment that the amount of food you get from hunting depends highly on how skilled you are, while fishing is less reliant on skill and more on luck. Suppose also that everyone in your village can only do one job, hunt or fish. Since hunting takes more skill, the skilled hunters hunt -even if they are better at fishing than the fishermen- and the least skilled hunters fish.
So even though poppies can grow everywhere, if your land is good at growing valuable things that don’t grow anywhere else, you’ll want to grow that and not poppies. Poppy growers, like Afghanistan, then take up poppy farming not because they are well suited to poppy growing, but because the land is ill suited for anything else.
They can grow in most places but only certain spots can produce a high yield (Afghanistan, SE & SW Asia & Latin America).
Places like Afghanistan can produce a good balance of quality and yield. Macedonia grows the highest quality (strongest) but with a much smaller yield.
I’m surprised that the top comments has not mentioned the fact that Afghanistan has experienced the worst drought in living memory. The drought went on for over a decade and was becoming more frequent. Poppies are very drought resistant and can survive in harsh environments like bad soil.
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