Water management, livestock and the opium economy: opium poppy cultivation in kunduz and balkh

This report draws together an initial set of field observations and working arguments in relation to the drivers of opium poppy cultivation in Kunduz and Balkh, Afghanistan.The authors note that Kunduz is valuable as a research location because of the current general absence of opium poppy cultivation, while in contrast, Balkh, with comparable conditions to Kunduz, is an area of expanding opium poppy cultivation. The report aims to investigate the reasons for this contrast, to outline how future research in this project should be developed, and to consider the implications of emerging evidence for counter-narcotics policy.The report aims to set out to provide the basis for a longer-term research project in Kunduz and Balkh which will examine the incentives and drivers that have taken farmers into (or kept them out of) opium poppy production. It seeks to investigate the incentives, including those driven by government and donor action, either to keep farmers in opium poppy cultivation or to move them permanently out of it, and to examine over the period of the research how farmers and other actors respond to these incentives.Contrasts drawn from the study include:with respect to agro-ecological structures, it is evident (given that the bulk of cultivation of opium poppy in both provinces is or has been in irrigated areas) that while there are clearly issues of water distribution and upstream–downstream effects in both irrigation systems, the evidence as it stands indicates that the scale and extent of water shortages in the Balkh system appear to be much greater than in Kunduzthere is evidence of soil biophysical gradients: in the case of Kunduz a rising water table downstream limits the potential for opium poppy cultivation, while in Charbolak in Balkh, for example, increasingly sandy soils downstream where available water is least means both lower fertility and greater demand for water the amount of landlessness and the degree of food insecurity in the Kunduz irrigation system appears to be less than in the Balkh irrigation scheme. This may be a consequence of a more productive environment in the former supporting an intensive double-cropping system with relatively high returns from rice and cotton production.