If poppies can grow all over the world, why is it that opium production is so heavily concentrated in Afghanistan?

Question

If poppies can grow all over the world, why is it that opium production is so heavily concentrated in Afghanistan?

In: 8505

Answer 1

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.