As the next poppy season approaches, the Taliban possibly find themselves in the unenviable situation of tackling both poppy farmers and drugs traders at the same time.
Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2024 will be one of the lowest levels on record. In parallel, there is evidence that the Taliban is applying increasing pressure to the opium trade, including upping the frequency and volume of drug seizures. This is leading to a rise in smuggling costs and the antipathy of drug traders as they, like the farmers, begin to feel the impact of the drugs ban.
As the next poppy planting season approaches, the Taliban risks opening too many fronts in its counternarcotics effort. For example, were the Taliban to continue to confront drug traders, particularly targeting their allies in the south, as well as mount a more robust attempt to eliminate widespread poppy cultivation in Badakhshan in 2025, it could lead to the regime losing support and ultimately destabilise Taliban rule.
Experience shows that sustaining a poppy ban in the absence of viable economic alternatives is a challenge, particularly as greater numbers of farmers and communities are exposed to economic hardship. However, with the United Nation’s current focus on widely discredited “alternative livelihoods” programmes – crop substitution targeted at landed farmers in the south and southwest – there is a risk that any international response rewards those who have stored substantial amounts of opium and have been most advantaged by the Taliban drug ban and the rise in prices that followed, rather than those who have been made most vulnerable.
Possibly the lowest level of poppy cultivation on record
Satellite imagery analysis for 2024 shows a further marked reduction in aggregate levels of poppy cultivation, decreasing from 22,642 hectares in 2023 (see Box 1 below) to only 7,382 hectares in 2024, a substantial drop from the 211,096 hectares grown in 2022 (see Figure 1). Afghanistan’s previous record low level of cultivation was estimated at 7,606 hectares in 2001, reported by UNODC following the first Taliban poppy ban. These two figures may not be strictly comparable as this earlier estimate was derived from visual assessments in situ rather than satellite imagery.
Reductions in poppy cultivation were achieved this year due to substantial falls in the amount of poppy in provinces where it continued to be widely cultivated in 2023, including Badakhshan, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Daykundi. Cultivation fell to below 1,000 hectares in all these provinces except Badakhshan, where, contrary to other provinces, poppy cultivation increased between 2022 and 2023.
Figure 1: Imagery analysis showing poppy density in Afghanistan, 2022 to 2024.
Although poppy cultivation has fallen in Badakhshan in 2024, it appears to have had little to do with the Taliban’s counternarcotics efforts in the province. For example, the reductions in poppy cultivation that were achieved were largely in more remote and typically rainfed areas where farmers would not have been subject to pressure from the Taliban to refrain from planting. Whereas poppy remained widespread in the far more accessible lower valleys of the districts of Argo, Baharak, and Jurm and even increased in the districts of Darayem and Khash.
Box 1: the Badakhshan crop estimates
This latest imagery analysis includes a 2024 estimate for the poppy crop in Badakhshan and a reworking of the estimates for 2022 and 2023. This season, the method was refined, and enhancements were introduced to our image classification methodology – including a multi-sensor approach combining optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery – that helped refine field boundaries, differentiate between crop types and reduce false positive classification results.
Accurate assessments have proven particularly challenging for Badakhshan due to a wide variation in altitude, the cultivation of crops in river valleys and rainfed lands, and the tendency to plant poppy in both the fall and the spring. The result is a significant variation in crop stages across Badakhshan and a two-month window for imagery collection. When conducted at a provincial level, this can result in early-growth stage wheat being misclassified as poppy. This year, the method was improved, and the window for imagery collection was narrowed to a three to four-week window for each district, thereby significantly improving crop identification. There is less variation in plant growth in other higher altitude provinces like Daykundi and Ghor, where the crop is mainly found in river valleys. This makes it easier to collect imagery and identify crops within a narrowed window of time.
The new estimates for Badakhshan reveal a poppy crop that was not as widespread as initially reported, with cultivation reaching a peak of 6,795 ha in 2023, not the 15,388 ha we first reported. These improvements in the imagery-based crop mapping method in Badakhshan have refined our local estimates and impacted our national poppy figures. The national poppy figures have now been revised downwards to 211,096 ha in 2022 and 22,642 ha in 2023 from an initial estimate of 219,978 ha in 2022 and 31,264 ha in 2023.
In the coming weeks, the team will review the crop estimates for Badakhshan for 2019, 2020 and 2021, and update the national poppy figures for those years, as well as further refine the imagery collect and analysis, and the method moving forward. This body of work will also include a more detailed assessment of the geographic distribution of the change in poppy cultivation and the factors that played a determining role, including the impact of the reduction in land under agriculture in rainfed areas.
Moreover, despite the celebratory claims by the Taliban in the media, eradication in Badakhshan achieved little this season. Violence in the districts of Darayem and Argo in early May 2024, and then in Khash a few weeks later, prompted the Taliban to take a more measured approach to crop destruction, fearful of provoking more widespread resistance in a province where their rule can sometimes appear tenuous. High-resolution imagery analysis shows that the bulk of the crop remained untouched, and where eradication was conducted, only part of the field was destroyed, with much of the poppy left intact (see Figures 2 and 3). In the higher altitude districts of Badakhshan, where a spring poppy crop is planted, farmers will have welcomed the authorities’ leniency and the fact that eradication was only conducted after the poppy crop had been harvested.
It is likely that the authorities’ inability to destroy the crop in the face of violent local opposition, including the deaths of farmers for the second consecutive year and the absence of viable economic alternatives, will increase the resolve of many farmers in Badakhshan, making them more determined to plant poppy in the coming months. With opium in 2024 earning farmers in the province an estimated US$ 85 million at harvest time, creating 1.3 million labour days of work, and generating as much as US$ 6.1 million in daily wages, it is an economy that many are likely to look to continue into 2025. Given the economic stakes at play, it is conceivable that more farmers will die trying to protect their livelihoods in the face of a third year of the Taliban’s poorly implemented drug ban.
Figure 2: Imagery of eradication assessment in Argo, Badakhshan, June 2024.
Figure 3: Imagery of eradication assessment in Khash, Badakhshan, June 2024.
Opium prices continue to fall despite such low levels of cultivation
What is particularly surprising is that even after a second consecutive year of low poppy cultivation, the price of opium in Afghanistan continues to fall, suggesting the continued presence of significant inventory in-country (see Figure 4). Explanations for this downward trend are speculative, but likely, the dramatic rise in opium prices at the end of 2023 was an overreaction as traders and farmers anticipated the Taliban drug ban continuing into a second consecutive year. The result was that farmers and traders hoarded their stocks, expecting further price rises, creating a temporary shortage in the final months of the 2023 poppy planting season.
However, the prevalence of inventory, combined with growing awareness of continued planting in Badakhshan in early 2024, would have brought prices down as it became increasingly apparent that substantial amounts of opium remained in the pipeline. The winter is also a time of food scarcity in Afghanistan and a point in the agricultural cycle when farmers have few income-earning opportunities other than the sale of inventory. This is likely to have prompted farmers to sell part of their opium stocks to meet their household expenses, thereby increasing supply and reducing the price of opium. As the poppy cycle progressed, traders would have become more aware of the scale of the crop in Badakhshan, as well as some cultivation in other parts of the country, further driving down the price of opium.
Figure 4: The price of opium in Nangarhar, Kandahar, and Badakhshan, January 2022 to September 2024.
We also cannot ignore the role that increased supply from Pakistan, and possibly even Iran in 2024, may have had on Afghan opium prices. Satellite imagery shows a substantial rise in poppy cultivation in the district of Khyber in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan between 2022 and 2023 and further potential increases in 2024 (see Figures 5 and 6). There are also reports (and videos) of widespread poppy cultivation in Balochistan in 2024, which will also have added to the amount of opium in the supply chain and potentially further depressed prices in Afghanistan.
There is also the very real possibility that when opium prices increased so rapidly in late 2023, without a commensurate hike in the price of morphine base, heroin base and heroin hydrochloride, processing was no longer profitable in Afghanistan, and the demand for opium from traders and lab owners would have fallen. This, too, would have put further downward pressure on the price of opium this year.
Figure 5: Imagery analysis showing increasing poppy cultivation in a research site in Khyber district, Pakistan, 2022 to 2023.
Figure 6: Imagery analysis showing equal amounts of poppy cultivation in the same research site in Khyber district, Pakistan, in 2024, but with large amounts of cleared land due to the spring harvest, some of which are likely to have been poppy.
Tackling the trade and opening a second front in the counter-narcotics effort
Although the Taliban’s 2022 drug ban had largely targeted, there is growing evidence that the Taliban has imposed greater restrictions on the opium trade in the run-up to and after “Doha 3” - the United Nations facilitated meeting held in late June 2024 between senior representatives of the donor community and Taliban officials.
For example, since May 2024, there has been a dramatic increase in the monthly volume of opium seized, including several substantial seizures. In June 2024, the sale of opium was banned in public places across the south and southwest and some of the primary bazaars in the east. Much of this law enforcement activity focused on the post-harvest trade in Badakhshan and along the Afghan-Iranian border in Kang District in Nimroz (see Figures 7 and 8). The result is an increase in the cost of transport inside Afghanistan and smuggling across its borders.
Figure 7: imagery showing the density of opium seizures in Afghanistan in 2023 and 2024 (until August).
Figure 8: Imagery showing border hardening at the Afghan-Iranian border near Kang.
However, the recent decision to target the southwest has resulted in a growing resentment towards the Taliban amongst opium traders and signs of “buyer’s remorse” amongst some of those who had provided financial support to the Taliban during the insurgency. Continued action against the trade in this area, including any effort to target inventory, would strike at the interests of some of the Taliban’s core constituents. Both traders and farmers would experience significant economic losses were they to be unable to sell their inventories and benefit from the almost six-fold increase in opium prices following the ban, a move that is likely to undermine political support for the Taliban leadership.
It is also worth noting that the Taliban conducted several law enforcement campaigns in the fall of 2023, only for them to subside after a short while. As such, it is unclear how long this current round of enforcement action might last. Moreover, although seizures of opium have increased substantially in the last few months, they remain relatively insignificant when overall production is considered: an estimated 414 metric tons of opium in 2024, 1,280 metric tons in 2023, and as much as 13,320 metric tons in 2022 when poppy was last grown extensively. Consequently, to date, the Taliban has made limited efforts to tackle the trade and processing of opiates.
Why the Taliban has increased its counternarcotics efforts at this point remains unclear. However, many policymakers and analysts continue to remain sceptical as to their overall intent to enforce the ban on the trade and processing of opiates, especially given that the recent interdiction campaign has coincided with the UN-led Doha process, suggesting the Taliban may be primarily seeking to gain political favour from the international community.
The economic effects of the poppy ban are unevenly distributed
In the south and southwest, substantial opium inventories have insulated landed farmers from the economic effects of the drug ban. Thanks to the stocks they hold, many have seen their purchasing power and capital increase with the dramatic rise in opium prices that followed Haibatullah’s announcement in April 2022.
Although prices have fallen since their peak of US$ 1,024 per kilogramme in December 2023 to US$597 in September 2024, a landowner that used only hired labour during the poppy harvest in 2022 could still earn the equivalent of a net income of $30,000 per hectare on any opium they retained were they to sell it now; a landlord would earn slightly more (see Figure 9). Given this, it should be of little surprise that these farmers still overwhelmingly support the continuation of the ban, as it has inflated the values of their remaining stocks. However, these farmers also recognise that in time, their stocks will be depleted, and they, too, will face lower incomes unless and until poppy cultivation resumes.
Figure 9: Graph showing the net returns on one hectare of poppy in southwest Afghanistan, differentiating by land tenure and date of sale.
Despite the increased income these landed farmers have experienced, there is little evidence of crop diversification amongst this group or signs of investment in other income-earning opportunities. Most have simply replaced poppy with wheat and live off their earnings from the sale of their opium stocks and the limited existing cash crops they grow. This may indicate a lack of investment opportunities in the area and possibly that farmers in the south and southwest anticipate that they may be able to return to poppy cultivation in the future.
In fact, satellite imagery analysis shows a marked reduction in the amount of land dedicated to vineyards, orchards, and “other crops” since 2022; the cash crops that, combined with non-farm incomes, can offer a viable, sustainable alternative to opium poppy cultivation. Instead, opium poppy has been replaced with wheat and fallow land, the implications of which are significant.
In particular, in the absence of a notable increase in the cultivation of viable cash crops, the Taliban poppy ban imposes significant economic costs on those households that do not have access to non-farm income or assets they can sell. While opium stocks are widely held by landed farmers in the south and southwest, this is not the case in eastern and northeastern Afghanistan, where landholdings are much smaller, and poppy cultivation per household has, therefore, been more limited. As a result, the Taliban’s poppy ban is having a much more significant adverse impact on the land-poor in the east and northeast, as well as the landless in the south and southwest. It is these vulnerable groups to whom any remedial efforts should be targeted.
The added stresses caused by environmental pressures
Furthermore, drought and falling groundwater have led to reductions in cultivable land and the loss of perennial crops across south and southwestern Afghanistan. This has exacerbated the effects of the drug ban, especially in the province of Kandahar, the home of the Taliban leadership, which could undermine its sustainability.
While landed farmers in the former desert areas of Kandahar still largely support the drugs ban due to its role in driving up the value of their inventory, there is increased awareness of the challenges they face in the medium to long term from continued prohibition. Monetising inventory remains an essential way for farmers in these areas to meet basic needs, more so for those not growing high-value perennial crops.
However, since 2022, there has been a dramatic drop in the amount of cultivated land in Kandahar that has also affected the amount and type of high-value perennials grown, with many farmers leaving parts of their vineyards and pomegranate crops to go dry (see Figure 11, 12 and 13). The result is further falls in annual on-farm income even for landed farmers who are compelled to sell increasing amounts of opium inventory to meet basic needs.
Figure 10: Imagery showing the change in land under cultivation in Kandahar in 2023 and 2024, differentiating by surface irrigated and former desert areas.
Figure 11: Imagery showing the removal of vineyards in Zhiray district, Kandahar, 2023 to 2024.
Figure 12: Imagery showing the removal of orchards in Daman district, Kandahar, 2023 to 2024.
If drought and the fall in groundwater continue, inventories will also decline faster, increasing the pressure to return to poppy cultivation. This is nowhere more so than in districts like Maiwand, where a lack of crop diversification, especially perennials, will have hit farmers particularly hard and where there were already signs of a growing number of farmers ignoring the Taliban poppy ban and attempting to grow poppy in 2024; only to have their crop destroyed. Greater coercion will be required if more significant numbers of farmers fail to comply with the ban, a move that could prove deeply unpopular. Moreover, should the Taliban increase its law enforcement efforts against the trade of opiates, this core constituency may end up withdrawing its support for the regime.
A failure to learn from the past
Prior to implementing its drug ban, the Taliban failed to put in place any mitigation measures that would enable farmers to transition out of poppy cultivation sustainably. Instead, the Taliban gambled that the international community would provide funding that would alleviate the economic hardship that the ban imposed on the land poor. The leadership, increasingly aware of the challenges some of their core constituents are now facing, are pressing donors with growing urgency to provide funds for so-called “alternative livelihoods” programs. Moreover, the United Nations is looking to oblige, announcing a conference on alternative livelihoods to be held later in the year, when donors will no doubt be asked to fund programmes they hope will provide some kind of alternative to poppy cultivation and prevent recidivism amongst farmers.
The question is what such programmes can hope to achieve and in what time frame. In 2022, the last year in which poppy was cultivated extensively, the crop would have been worth US$1.3 billion to farmers in the March just prior to the harvest and US$2.5 billion a few weeks later after Haibatullah had announced his drugs ban, prices had doubled, and the opium had been collected. The poppy crop would also have created approximately 77 million labour days of work that growing season, of which as much as a third would have been for hired labour, generating around US$130 million in income for the land poor.
Yet, most alternative livelihoods programmes are simply crop substitution efforts – short-term and geographically boundaried projects targeting landed farmers with support so that they can grow one or more high-value crops. No doubt, the United Nations and the Taliban authorities hope that these might go some way to compensate farmers for the loss of their poppy crop.
However, over the past thirty years, there have been numerous fragmented initiatives in Afghanistan, and few have enabled farmers to sustainably transition out of poppy cultivation, as documented in a multitude of evaluations. It is also worth noting that over the course of the intervention in Afghanistan, the US spent at least $1.46 billion on alternative livelihoods programmes, most of which failed to prevent opium cultivation reaching record highs. In today’s context, it seems unlikely that donors would be willing to commit to the levels of funding required to make a difference over the long term.
Alternative livelihood projects have been consistently judged as too short-term to bring about effective agricultural change, particularly in encouraging the uptake of longer maturation crops like perennials, which can take three to five years to reach fruition. An exclusive focus on support for landed farmers to move into high-value crops, like orchards and vineyards, has also been judged as detrimental to the land poor, who often rely on the much more labour-intensive poppy to access land, income, and housing. In the absence of poppy and any assistance targeting the land poor, they face economic ruin and often move to new areas to cultivate poppy – “the so-called balloon effect”. Consequently, these programmes have failed to meet either drug control aims or the pro-poor objectives of development organisations.
It appears that while lessons have been documented, they have not been learned. The emphasis of current alternative livelihoods programmes remains on targeting agricultural assistance to landed farmers in the south and the southwest rather than the land poor in these areas, and those farmers in the northern and eastern provinces who work small land holdings.
Yet, landed farmers in the south and southwest have been most advantaged by the poppy ban and the rise in opium prices that followed. With their significant inventory of opium that has increased in value, these farmers lack neither the necessary land and capital to invest in high-value perennials nor the technical know-how to grow these crops. Rather, it is the lack of purchasing power in domestic markets, problems of drought and falling groundwater, and the market barriers neighbours like Pakistan impose on Afghan agricultural exports that not only prevent these farmers from increasing their production of orchards and vineyards but compel them to abandon their perennials and leave them to dry.
Moreover, current economic analysis suggests that a typical household of ten would need at least two hectares of cultivated agricultural land, with more than half of it dedicated to high-value perennials, to even meet the international poverty line of US$2.15 per person day (see Figure 13). Even greater amounts of land would be required for a household to be able to cover the costs of higher-value items, such as a deep well for irrigation, marriage, a motorbike, and the costs of care for more serious illnesses - all of which are necessities for agricultural households in Afghanistan.
With most Afghan farmers cultivating less than a hectare of cultivable land, crop substitution and a focus on on-farm income will achieve little in mitigating the pressures to return to poppy cultivation in the future, particularly in light of increasing population and environmental pressures. Instead, far more needs to be done to create non-farm income opportunities, a finding documented in multiple empirical studies in Afghanistan by the Afghan Research & Evaluation Unit, USAID and most recently, the United Nations Development Program, but also in the experiences of other countries that have made the shift out of illicit poppy cultivation, including Thailand and Pakistan.
Figure 13: Gross returns on typical cropping patterns in former desert areas of Kandahar, differentiating by land size.
Decades of evidence from other drug-producing countries demonstrate sustainable reductions in cultivation require a growing economy and the creation of large numbers of jobs to support the land-poor and absorb those that will be displaced from poppy cultivation. To achieve the kind of development effort needed to support an enduring reduction in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan would require a dramatic change in the current relationship between the Taliban and the international community. In particular, it would require donors to commit to working closely with the Taliban over the next decade or longer to transform the rural economy. This would not only require a change in political direction by both the Taliban and most major donors, but it would also need more than a decade of significant funding, as well as donors and implementing agencies learning lessons from experience over the past more than 20 years.
A troubling year ahead?
While the Taliban have imposed a second consecutive year of low levels of poppy cultivation, caution is needed when interpreting what this says about Taliban rule and the likely sustainability of the ban. In Afghanistan, as in other drug-growing countries, poppy cultivation can be used as a proxy indicator of government writ: where areas that have high levels of poppy cultivation are seen to be unruly and beyond the control of the government, whereas those with negligible poppy growth are considered to be under its command.
While under the Taliban, poppy cultivation has fallen for the second consecutive year and reached a level that is one of the lowest recorded. The ban’s sustainability is dependent on the high price of opium and the inventories that are held by the Taliban’s core supporters (and fighters) in the south and southwest. Currently, coercion is used only sparingly in these areas, as most landed farmers continue to support the ban due to the significant economic advantage they have derived from the dramatic increase in opium prices, particularly in the run-up to the planting season towards the end of 2023.
Imagery analysis shows that there are around 285,425 rural households in the south and southwest, of which an estimated 70% - the equivalent of 1.75 million people - are landed, are likely to have retained some opium stocks, and have therefore been advantaged by the Taliban drug ban. These stocks have provided an economic cushion for communities that have been denied the opportunity to grow opium for two consecutive seasons by the Taliban leadership. In turn, this has protected the Taliban leadership from the potential political repercussions of what appears, on the surface, to be denying their core constituents a livelihood, a decision that has proven to have been destabilising for those in power in Afghanistan in the past.
Figure 14: Imagery showing the amount of agricultural land and the number of households in the south and southwest of Afghanistan.
In contrast, it has proven much more challenging to prevent widespread cultivation in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, where small landholdings and the absence of both viable economic alternatives and inventory means the economic effects of the ban are much more punitive. Under these economic conditions, greater levels of coercion are inevitably required.
However, this type of coercion could also emerge over time in the south and southwest. As a greater number of landed farmers reach the point where they do not have sufficient opium for sale to compensate for their lower levels of on-farm income and to meet their basic needs, more will move to again plant opium poppy. It is at such a juncture that the Taliban leadership would need to turn to its fighters and ask them to turn on their own families and communities, a situation that has not played well in the past.
Ultimately, the Taliban face several challenges in the months ahead as they approach the coming poppy planting season. Given continued widespread poppy cultivation in many of the main irrigated areas in Badakhshan in the spring and summer of 2024, local resistance to the Taliban’s efforts to destroy the crop, and the authorities’ subsequent retreat in the face of such opposition, a much more robust campaign to deter planting will be required in the next few months. Better this and avoid the need for eradication in spring than risk the repeat of the violent unrest they faced this year, as this would undoubtedly further undermine their rule in the province and possibly elsewhere.
If the Taliban regime and its leadership are determined to prevent Badakhshan from becoming an inspiration to communities in other provinces who are looking to return to widespread planting, they will need a more significant military presence in the province in the coming months. This could involve fighters from other provinces, including Pashtoons, the actions of which prompted significant unrest in the spring of 2024.
Yet, pursuing this course of action while at the same time targeting the opium trade in the south and southwest will open a further front in the Taliban’s current counternarcotics effort that could prove overwhelming for them. The months ahead in the run-up to the planting season for the 2025 crop will tell us much more about how the Taliban leadership is viewing the drugs ban and whether they calculate that continuing it offers them any political advantage.
David Mansfield has been conducting research on illicit economies in Afghanistan and on its borders each year since 1997. David has a PhD in development studies and is the author of “A State Built on Sand: How opium undermined Afghanistan.” He has produced more than eighty research-based products on rural livelihoods and cross-border economies, many for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, and working in close partnership with Alcis. David was also the lead researcher on the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s Counter Narcotics: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan, covering the period from 2002- 2017.
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