Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Opium ban

Opium ban

The Fourth Year of the Opium Ban: An update from two of Afghanistan’s major poppy-growing areas

Fabrizio Foschini • Jelena Bjelica •

The Islamic Emirate’s ban on opium cultivation has entered its fourth year and apart from the first harvest of opium poppies in spring 2022, when farmers were allowed to harvest their standing crop, the authorities have enforced it, with one notable exception – Badakhshan. Farmers there have been better able to avoid the ban, both […]

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Migrating Poppy Cultivation: Afghan poppy farmers in Balochistan

Jelena Bjelica • Nur Khan Himmat •

After the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) banned opium poppy cultivation in April 2022, there was a movement of some farmers from southern Afghanistan into neighbouring regions of Pakistan to grow poppy there. The same migration to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces followed the first Taliban ban on opium in 2000-01. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica, together […]

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A farmer walks through his destroyed poppy field on the outskirts of Lashkargah in Helmand Province. Photo by Sanaullah Seiam/AFP, 9 April 2023

The Opium Ban: The impact on small farmers, sharecroppers and labourers in Helmand province

Ali Mohammad Sabawoon • Jelena Bjelica •

In what used to be Afghanistan’s largest poppy-growing province, Helmand, cultivation plummeted by 99 per cent in 2023 following the Islamic Emirate’s ban on the crop in April 2022. Although opium trading largely continued, which brought windfall profits to anyone with opium stocks to sell, the ban on cultivation has caused unemployment and an economic […]

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A poppy farmer and labourer by the farmer's crop in Nad Ali district, Helmand Province in spring 2015. Photo: Andrew Quilty, 2015.

Prosperity or Penury: The political and economic fallout of the opium ban in Afghanistan

Kate Clark • Jelena Bjelica •

Two new reports, one from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and another by David Mansfield and Alcis, show that Afghan farmers have largely complied with the Islamic Emirate’s ban on opium cultivation. They chart a swingeing cut in cultivation in 2023 – just 10,000 to 30,000 hectares of land sown with opium […]

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opium 2022

The New Taleban’s Opium Ban: The same political strategy 20 years on?

Jelena Bjelica • Kate Clark •

Seven and a half months after they took power in Afghanistan, the Taleban have officially banned opium. Observers had been waiting to see if they would implement their promise to ban narcotics made shortly after they captured Kabul. The ban has come at the beginning of the opium harvest and at a time when Afghans […]

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