Afghanistan - Wheat versus poppy on Helmand frontline

[Lunar Loops]

This article on the US Aid strategy to get farmers away from opium crops comes from The Financial Times UK(article link):

Wheat versus poppy on Helmand frontline

By Jon Boone in Lashkagar
Published: August 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 19 2008 03:00
The stalls may have been displaying innocuous produce and specialist farming equipment, but many of the turbaned Afghan men at the opening of the second ever agricultural fair in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, were almost certainly more into opium than alfalfa and wheat.

They are some of the people who in the past seven years have helped make the province into the world's biggest producer of opium, dedicating some of Afghanistan's most productive agricultural land to the poppy.

The US Agency for International Development, which paid for the event, hopes it will encourage licit business deals, open up new markets abroad and spread technical knowledge that will help them cut Afghanistan's $4bn-a-year (€2.7bn, £2.1bn) poppy industry.

"If you look at the drug supply trade, narco-traffickers are adding value at every stage of the process. That's the way agriculture in Afghanistan has to go, to be able to add value to what they can grow here," says Loren Stoddard, director of USAid's alternative agriculture programme in Afghanistan.

The agency's strategy is to help re-establish markets for some of the crops that Helmand was once famous for - corn and grapes and other fruit as well as new products such as chillies and peanut oil.

With wheat prices up this year and opium prices slumping because of massive overproduction, they believe they could have a breakthrough this year after bumper poppy harvests.

"We've heard rumours that [the area under cultivation] could fall by as much as 20 per cent as farmers look at the way prices are going and start to think it might be a good idea to diversify a bit into wheat," Mr Stoddard says.

Some well-known narco-barons are already moving into legal agricultural businesses simply because they can see the profits to be made, USAid officials claim.

Farmers will be further encouraged by USAid concentrating seed and fertiliser distribution in the relatively secure areas around the provincial capital.

Agri-businesses stand to gain from greater power supplies with the restoration of the Kajaki hydroelectric dam and the construction of an agricultural business park and an airport to ship high-end fruit to Dubai and beyond.

The USAid strategy is to help farmers move into large-scale commercial contract farming which they believe is both possible in Helmand's well-watered agricultural area and at least as lucrative as poppy.

To help matters, the agency has set up a model farm on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, where acres of immaculately planted crops, many drip-fed with irrigation systems far superior to the traditional Helmandi trench-flooding system, are guarded by fortified machine-gun posts.

"Someone is going to make a fortune in Helmand and it's not going to be in opium. If I could invest I would put everything I've got into lamb fattening. It's a 150-200 per cent return in 60 days," says Rory Donohoe, USAid's programme director in Lashkar Gah.

Mr Donohoe and Mr Stoddard, two MBAs who left lucrative private sector careers behind before moving into development, cheerfully admit that some of the earlier USAid cash-for-work schemes designed to sop up unemployment were not the answer to Helmand's problems because it was only ever a short-term measure.

But creating genuine markets for legal products remains a daunting task in the province hardest hit by the Taliban insurgency.

According to an Afghan official charged with drumming up enthusiasm for the agricultural fair, 240 buyers had promised to come but only 30 turned up at the opening. The roads, he explained, were too dangerous for some people to travel to the provincial capital.