Britain leads a £1-billion-a-year international programme to eradicate illicit opium production in Afghanistan by destroying farmers’ poppies and persuading them to grow other crops. As an anti-narcotics strategy, this programme is a demonstrable failure. In terms of counter-terrorism, it is a disaster. But a scheme unveiled this week can, finally, offer some hope.

Six years into the eradication programme, Afghanistan produces 92 per cent of the world’s opium, more than ever before. This is not going to change, or not by enough to wean Afghanistan from its deadly dominance of the heroin trade. Last year, the area under poppies increased to 165,000 hectares, 59 per cent more than in 2005. It was up by 169 per cent in Helmand province, where, as British field commanders attest, opium profits fill Taleban coffers and eradication acts as their recruiting sergeant. The Taleban pose as the poppy farmers’ protectors. The Government has to defend the farmers better, or lose the battle for their allegiance.

Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics operations are a corrupt farce. A mere 8 per cent of total acreage was destroyed last year, and the UN reports that, when eradication teams finish work in a village, two thirds of the crop has typically been left standing.

Local politicians order the destruction of rival crops and protect their own. Of the $75 million given or pledged to the Government’s trust fund for alternative crops, a paltry million has actually been spent. The problem is not merely corruption and inefficiency, but the lack of viable alternatives. Wheat, the other main regional crop, yields a tenth of the cash to be made from poppies, not enough to feed smallholders’ families.

A duty to find way to reduce crop

Does Britain have a plan any more for dealing with the soaring drugs crisis in Afghanistan?

BACKGROUND

• How misery of heroin was brought home to Afghanistan

• Fears over record opium crop

• Good and bad news from the poppy fields

• Ruined poppy farmers join ranks with the Taleban

The Foreign Office stolidly insists that poppy eradication, coupled with improved law enforcement and better managed rural aid, is the only approach. This is whistling in the Afghan wind. Eradication is worse than ineffective; it dangerously alienates villagers whose first or perhaps only contact with central government is the convoy that rips up their means of survival. Without counting the gangsters who dominate the traffic, opium involves 2.9 million Afghans in cultivation and another 225,000 traders – 14 per cent of the total population. So many people cannot be treated as criminals. Nato refuses, with reason, to be directly involved in eradication; inflicting ruin on the people you are there to protect is no way to “win hearts and minds”.

How then to escape this Catch-22? Governments have considered routinely buying up and destroying the entire crop, but that would reward illegality. Moreover, the Taleban exact a share of farmers’ income from opium, so much of that cash would go to the Taleban. The Canadians favour paying farmers the same prices for other crops that they get for opium poppies, a recipe for enriching corrupt officials and further distorting the Afghan economy. Local surveys show that opium farmers, many of whom are deep in opium-denominated debt to traffickers and who see less than a third of the theoretical “market price” for their crops, would far rather earn a living legally. But opium is by far their most reliable “banker” crop.

Taking the poppy out of the Afghan equation is impossible. So why not turn those 6,100 tonnes of poppies into a legal source of wealth? The world is desperately short, it happens, of affordable opiate-based painkillers. In developing countries, these drugs are either unavailable or unaffordable. Processed into pills, the Afghan crops we are spending millions attempting to destroy could meet that need, exporting relief instead of misery to millions.

There are precedents. In Turkey and India, the illicit trade has been channelled into licensed production for medicinal purposes. The US Government objects that Afghanistan’s weak Government could never insulate “legal” production from the drugs chain.

But at village level, the country’s traditional shuras, or councils, exercise powerful systems of social control. This week the Senlis Council, an independent medical research organisation based in France, came up with a scheme to involve them in legal morphine production.

The key feature of “Poppies for Medicine” is to create village industries that turn opium into medicine in local factories. All profits would go to the community, giving the shuras of the participating villages a strong vested interest in preventing diversion to traffickers and turning informer against the drug barons. The idea is to select clusters of five to ten villages and sign contracts with the shuras. The shuras would guarantee each village’s committed participation, decide what land to cultivate, employ harvesters, guards, record-keepers and informants, and ensure that the whole village shared in the benefits. The shuras would be responsible for monitoring production and punishing individuals caught diverting opium. Failure to do so would lose the village its licence.

Because the price of morphine medicines is far higher than for raw opium, the scheme would boost incomes and local tax revenues and give villagers a future within the law, worth fighting the drug barons to secure. It would take raw opium out of the supply chain. At the other end of the benefit scale, cheap Afghan morphine pills could be exported, much like generic HIV/Aids drugs, to countries that could not otherwise afford them.

The scheme is compatible with existing Afghan law and international regulations on narcotics control. Gordon Brown should insist on putting the idea to the test. Poppies for Medicine will not solve Afghanistan’s opium crisis overnight, but a shift to licensed production could turn a losing battle into a win for Afghanistan and the world. It would be folly not to try.

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