U.N. Says Afghan Opium Production Down
The 2009 Afghan Opium Survey by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reports that opium production is down by 10 percent and prices are at a 10-year low. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution about, says the figures can be attributed more to market adjustment and less to counternarcotic efforts.
NOAH ADAMS, host:
Opium is the cash crop in Afghanistan. And according to a new United Nations report, the bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. Cultivation is down 22 percent, prices are at a 10-year low. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She's been studying the illicit opium economy in many countries, including Afghanistan. She last traveled there in April. What do you make of the situation, these numbers?
Ms. VANDA FELBAB-BROWN (Fellow, Brookings Institution): The numbers are good but I would not overestimate their significance. In some ways we're chasing the false statistic. We keep looking at the level of cultivation, where the real metric that we should be focusing on is whether Afghan's dependant on opium poppy cultivation of alternative livelihood. And I would proceed that on the latter part of the story is much less positive than the celebrated foreign cultivation or in opium production.
ADAMS: You're talking about alternative livelihoods, other things to grow, other ways to make money.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Absolutely where the rural alternative livelihoods in farming or off farm in the cities. And in fact what we have been seeing on these legal livelihoods are negative trends, constrictions of the market rather than expansion. And this reason why I'm very skeptical that the so-called achievements can really be sustainable because many people still depend on opium. Moreover, the major reason why opium production has fell is just the tremendous over-production that we've seen. For several years now, the level of cultivation and opium production has been several times higher than the total global estimate in markets for opiates. So it was just a matter of time before it would start falling.
ADAMS: Afghanistan making more - putting together more opium shipments than the world needed, right?
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Absolutely.
ADAMS: Go back to the report for a moment - what do you see happening? The United Nations is talking about a NATO and Afghan troops' counter-offensive, counter-narcotic strategy against the growers. Do you see that working?
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Well, in fact the strategy that the Obama administration has rolled out is not a strategy against the growers. We see a major move away from eradication-focus on the poppy farms and the farmers.
ADAMS: Mm-hmm.
Ms. FELBAB BROWN: The new strategy now will have two elements. It'll be focused on rural development, rural livelihoods that would be the way to deal with the farmers, and on interdiction of traffickers. NATO itself will focus on interdiction of Taliban linked traffickers. And in fact the U.S. has put out the list of Taliban-linked traffickers that it wants to either apprehend or more controversially kill.
ADAMS: But do you see evidence that that's been successful in recent months.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Well, it's too early to say. In fact, whatever the fall in opium is this year, it's not the result of the strategy. This is just being implemented and its details are still being worked out. And there are in fact many questions left about what interdiction will look like, what their livelihoods will look like. So the current shifts in opium production are largely due to market forces, the over-production that we've seen, and to a smaller extent also as a result of counter-narcotic policies undertaking in the past year. I would argue however that especially the aspect that's due to counter-narcotics policies, like suppression in Nangahar province or wheat substitution in Helmand, are not sustainable or, in fact, not the way to go and to emulate.
ADAMS: Five thousand tons is the world market sort of need. Afghanistan could well supply that, does well supply that possibly. Does that demand ever change?
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Well, indeed the number that you quote that this in fact higher than what we have believed. Counter-narcotic experts for many years believed that the global demand is about 3,000 metric tons.
ADAMS: I was quoting the U.N. report.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: So they adjusted to their own numbers. For long time that the number of (unintelligible) about 3,000 metric tons. But it's also indicative of just how soft data we have.
ADAMS: Soft data.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: It's also indicative of the biggest failure of counter-narcotics for the past 30, 40 years, which really has been to do anything about demand. If anything across a range of illicit narcotics we have seen the men growing, be it meth, be it cocaine in Europe and opiates in the world.
ADAMS: That's meth, cocaine and opiates.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: Not in the U.S. where cocaine has been slightly falling off, demand has been falling off as the population of cocaine addicts from the 1980s is aging. And the opium market in the U.S. has never been very high and it's more or less stable there - little shift. But we have seen big increases elsewhere in the world,. Pakistan is a major producer - major consumer, sorry, has been for many years - very little changes. And critically Russia and China have become huge new entrants with massively expanding demand and very little focus on demand reduction.
ADAMS: Vanda Felbab Brown is a fellow at the Brookings Institution here in Washington, D.C. thank you.
Ms. FELBAB-BROWN: My pleasure.
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