Mike Dubois, a representative for U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., talks with an Afghan farmer while visiting the Nangarhar Province this year. Nangarhar is the second-most productive province for poppy farming in Afghanistan. In 2006, almost 19,000 hectares of opium poppies were grown by farmers in Nangarhar. (Photo courtesy of the Missouri National Guard)
By GRANT SMITH/Missourian
The world’s largest producer of opium expanded poppy production by nearly 60 percent last year and generated about $3 billion of illicit economic activity in Afghanistan.
The Missouri National Guard wants to change that by ending Afghan farmers’ dependence on the poppy crop and transforming legal agriculture into a profitable alternative.
This fall, Capt. Doug Dunlap of the Guard will lead a team of four or five guardsmen to Afghanistan to lay the groundwork for a pilot project designed to effect a sea change in the agriculture industry.
The Guard’s efforts will focus on a valley in Nangarhar Province on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan. If it is successful, the hope is that the model will be replicated throughout the country.
A larger group of about 50 Guard members will join Dunlap’s team in the valley in February, and MU’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources will have their back, so to speak.
“No matter how many experts we take to Afghanistan, we’re going to run into challenges we can’t come up with a solution for,” Dunlap said.
Dunlap is well-suited to the task. He grew up in a farming family near Poplar Bluff. His parents grew rice and kept about 100 head of cattle. For 46 years, they also have operated a farm equipment dealership. Dunlap earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from MU in 1993, and he has worked in agribusiness ever since, as a supervisor and livestock buyer for a company that is now part of Tyson and for a cooperative that provides financial services to farmers. Many members of the Missouri National Guard can tell similar stories about their backgrounds, which is why they were chosen for this project.
The plan calls for Missouri’s citizen soldiers to provide technical farming advice and to rebuild infrastructure to make agriculture an attractive alternative to the opium trade for Afghan farmers.
The guardsmen will “help improve their irrigation systems, providing techniques for fertilizing, reconstitution (of the soil), planting, harvesting, marketing and storage of a variety of crops,” said Capt. Tammy Spicer, spokeswoman for the Missouri National Guard.
Dunlap is quick to stress that successful farming practices in the United States may not necessarily translate to success in Afghanistan. The Guard will be looking for Afghan solutions to Afghan problems, Dunlap said.
“We can’t take an American ideal and an American way of doing things and expect it to automatically work in Afghanistan,” Dunlap said.
When the Guard runs into a problem with no immediate solution, it will call on MU’s College of Agriculture or the Missouri Farm Bureau for advice, Dunlap said.
The logistics are still being worked out, but “basically we’ve been asked to provide disciplinary expertise for the Missouri National Guard who are in Afghanistan,” said Marc Linit, associate dean and associate director of research and extension at the college.
“We’re not looking for cutting-edge agricultural technology,” Linit said. “We’re looking at very simple approaches to improving agriculture so that the Afghans who are farmers can make a living on legitimate crops.”
The college will then connect the Guard member with the appropriate expert, Linit said.
“There’s been a lot of advances in agriculture in the last 50 years,” Dunlap said. “The Afghans have not benefited from any of those technological advances, so what we’re going to do is help catch them up. All their farming is very labor-intensive, very low-tech.”
But the challenge is as much an economic one as it is a technical one. It means encouraging a war-torn nation to stop growing its No. 1 cash crop.
Poppy production in Afghanistan is increasing and the trade of opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, is expanding, according to the CIA World Factbook, generating economic activity roughly equivalent to 35 percent of Afghanistan’s entire legal gross domestic product. Poppy farmers collectively earn about $600 million a year.
“One of the problems here is we don’t want Afghan farmers to produce poppy because of the drug problem, obviously, but you can’t just ask people to give up their livelihood without giving them an alternative,” Linit said.
“We can encourage Afghan farmers to stop producing poppy and raise other crops that would provide them with an equal or better livelihood,” Linit said. “My understanding is Afghan farmers who produce poppy understand the problems with that. They just don’t have an alternative. We’re trying to provide alternative crops so they can raise a family, have economic security and not have to be involved in the drug trade.”
The Kabul River valley where the Missouri National Guard will be concentrating its effort is roughly 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, located in the center of Nangarhar Province, Dunlap said.
“It really looks nothing like the rest of Afghanistan,” Dunlap said.
In fact, it looks a lot more like the fertile river bottoms of Missouri, albeit a bit warmer.
“It’s a very fertile valley with three growing seasons,” Dunlap said. “It really does have a broad spectrum of crops that grow there.”
It was about 120 degrees there in July when Dunlap visited, and the temperature rarely drops below freezing in the winter.
The crops grown in the Nangarhar Province aren’t that different from what Missouri farmers capitalize on. The Afghan farmers grow rice, corn, tomatoes, peppers, green beans and various kinds of nuts. There are a number of citrus orchards as well, and the valley can also produce wheat in the mild winter.
One market for these crops already exists; Nangarhar farmers just haven’t been able to capitalize on it. Nangarhar’s location on the Pakistani border gives Pakistanis easy access to Afghan crops.
The Afghan farmers have no cold storage, meaning that in hot weather, crops spoil within a day, Dunlap said.
The Pakistanis refrigerate their food purchases, and what isn’t consumed is sold back to the same Afghans who grew the crops in the first place at three to four times the original cost, Dunlap said. Construction of cold storage, such as root cellars, is one project for the Guard in Nangarhar Province.
Another is irrigation, which is done manually by directing water flow from ditches with shovels.This labor-intensive process could be improved with simple gates to open and close irrigation ditches, Dunlap said.
Also, the province’s veterinary school has no facilities for students to work with animals, so the Guard plans to build some small pens, chutes and gates, Dunlap said.
These are but a few of projects that have been identified.
“My sense is they’ll be working one-on-one with individuals who seem to be receptive to trying something different,” Linit said.
Another plus for the Nangarhar Province is that the political climate is fairly stable.
“It’s a U.S. military-controlled space we’ll be working in,” Dunlap said. “We’re going to this province because the security situation is such we think we can be successful.”
A provisional reconstruction team, made up of U.S. Air Force and Army personnel and a representative from the U.S. Agency for International Development, controls the valley.
However, the subsistence farming economy of Nangarhar exists within the second-most productive region for poppy cultivation, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and eradication efforts in the province have not stopped yearly poppy production increases.
Production did drop 96 percent in 2005, from nearly 28,000 hectares to 1,000 hectares, but jumped back up to nearly 5,000 hectares in 2006, according to the U.N. The province has produced nearly 19,000 hectares so far this year — the same level of production as four years ago, or roughly 10 percent of Afghanistan’s entire poppy crop, according to a recent report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
Traditional agriculture hasn’t taken off as a profitable alternative to the opium industry, and the root of the problem lies in history. Poppy has long been a cash crop for Afghan farmers.
“You can make a good living making poppy — better than growing other crops,” said Paul Wallace, an MU professor emeritus of political science. He studies international terrorism and South Asia, both disciplines that are closely tied to agriculture.
Unlike traditional farming, poppy cultivation doesn’t rely heavily on agricultural know-how or sophisticated technology; the poppy plant grows much like a weed, Wallace said.