Bringing interdiction and eradication targets to manageable levels, Poppy for Medicine projects would enable Afghanistan to defeat the illegal opium trade

Violence, corruption and crime are associated with the current illegal opium economy. This economy has to be tackled through the use of targeted law enforcement aiming at drug traffickers, salesmen and other middlemen and actors working in the illegal drug trafficking chain. By inducing rural farming communities to cut their links with insurgents and drug traffickers, village-based Poppy for Medicine s projects would facilitate the targeting of counter-narcotics resources at those who do not cultivate poppy as a survival strategy.

Poppy for Medicine projects would generate sufficient incentives for project communities to exclude spoilers

The local transformation of poppy into medicine would not only provide the means for rural farming communities to cut their economic links with drug traffickers, it would remove the raw poppy materials from farmers’ possession, thereby removing the possibility of maintaining such links with drug traffickers, enabling these communities to live within the law. Further, the revenues generated by Poppy for Medicine projects would be extensive enough to not only provide sufficient economic incentives for farming communities to exclude drug traffickers and insurgents, but also allow sufficient room to incorporate the needs of all potential stakeholders in a Poppy for Medicine project.

The local addition of value to raw poppy materials sharply differentiates Afghan Poppy for Medicine projects from the Indian legal opium business model, under which Indian farmers sell raw opium “at the farm gate” to the Indian government with no added value. The benefits to project participants illustrated in the village-level value chain for morphine also differentiate Poppy for Medicine projects from Afghanistan’s illegal drug market, under which farmers sell their poppy harvests at the farm gate to drug traders, having added only very little value by drying the crop.

Embedded diversification measures ensure that reliance on poppy would be phased out

By triggering the economic development necessary to decrease illegal poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, Poppy for Medicine projects would provide rural farming communities with access to the funds, development expertise, and economic conditions necessary to phase out poppy cultivation. As well as creating employment and building capacity in Afghanistan’s farming communities, Poppy for Medicine projects would provide for the compulsory phasing out of poppy cultivation, even for the production of medicines. The economic diversification measures embedded in the Poppy for Medicine project model would provide farming communities with both an access to the strategic assets necessary to end their reliance on poppy, and an obligation to do so.

As described in P4M Business Model section, the revenues from sales of locally-produced medicines would be channelled into economic diversification, through the direct funding of projects for the benefit of the entire community, and the indirect funding, through micro-finance principles, of individual project participants’ efforts to diversify their economic activities.

Wet opium