KABUL — The Taliban’s supreme leader on Sunday
ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in
Afghanistan, warning that the hardline
Islamist government would crack down on farmers planting the crop.
اضافة اعلان
Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer
of poppies, the source of sap that is refined into heroin, and in recent years
production and exports have only boomed.
“All Afghans are informed that from now on
cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country,” said a
decree issued by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.
The order was read out by government
spokesman
Zabihullah Mujahid at a gathering of reporters, foreign diplomats and
Taliban officials.
“If anyone violates the decree the crop will
be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the
sharia law,” it added.
It is not the first time the fundamentalist
group has vowed to outlaw the trade. Production was banned in 2000, just before
the group was overthrown by
US-led forces in the wake of the September 11
attacks.
During their 20-year insurgency against
foreign forces, the Taliban heavily taxed farmers cultivating the crop in areas
under their control, experts have said.
It became a key resource for the group to
generate funds.
Poppy farmer Abdul Rahman told AFP that
Sunday’s ban was a blow to his livelihood.
“We have taken loans to cultivate this... If
these crops are destroyed our income will be gone,” said Rahman, who is from
the southern province of Kandahar — the Taliban’s de facto power center.
“We too are not fond of cultivating this crop
and are fed up with it. We know our future generations will be addicted to it
but we are compelled to cultivate.”
Tough
to enforce ban
The US
and
NATO forces tried to curb poppy cultivation during their two decades in
Afghanistan by paying farmers to grow alternative crops such as wheat or
saffron.
But their attempts were thwarted by the
Taliban, who controlled the main poppy-growing regions and derived hundreds of
millions of dollars from the trade, experts have said.
Author David Mansfield, who has written a
book on Afghanistan’s opium trade, said the Taliban would find it difficult to
enforce the latest ban, as farmers had invested considerable resources in a
crop that was ready to harvest.
“It’s not just opium (farmers) smell, it’s
cash & what it buys after a cold winter of rising food prices &
economic crisis,” Mansfield tweeted.
Afghanistan’s economic and humanitarian
crisis has deepened since foreign donors cut off aid to the country in the
aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of the country in August last year.
Mansfield said the ban was an attempt by the
Taliban to divert the political debate in the country away from issues such as
“girls education & human rights”.
Last month the Taliban shut all secondary
schools for girls, just hours after reopening them for the first time since
seizing power, triggering international outrage.
Afghan media reports, meanwhile, have said
poppy production has increased in two southern provinces, Kandahar and Helmand,
since the Taliban returned to power, but did not provide data.
Afghanistan has a near-monopoly on opium and
heroin, accounting for 80 to 90 percent of global output, according to the
UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The amount of land used for planting poppies
hit a record high in 2017 and has averaged around 250,000 hectares in recent
years, roughly four times the level of the mid-1990s, UN figures show.
According to a UN survey in 2020, poppies were grown in
22 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
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