Afghanistan Should Grow Fuel, Not Drugs
In the US, gas prices are topping $4 a gallon, and the Democrat-controlled Congress continues to oppose efforts to increase domestic oil production. In Europe, farmers, fishermen and truckers have been taking to the streets to protest against rising fuel prices. And with the demand for oil from China, India and other developing nations continuing to grow, there’s no prospect of a meaningful reduction in prices any time soon.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Nato troops and Western aid organizations are battling to wean farmers off the cultivation of poppies as their primary source of income. Opium, which is leached from domesticated poppies, accounts for as much as half the country’s legal GDP and provides the raw material for some 90 per cent of the world’s heroin, with the proceeds helping to fund the Taliban and various affiliated warlords.
While “energy security” is often cited as a key factor in the campaign to defeat Islamic terrorism, the connection between rising fuel costs and the struggle to bring stability to Afghanistan may not be immediately obvious. But these apparently disparate problems could, in part, be addressed by a common solution.
The push to generate alternative sources of energy — initiated to address concerns over climate change but given added impetus by rising oil prices — has seen governments rushing headlong to increase the production of biofuels. And because some of the crops from which biofuels are produced are also grown for food, the policy has contributed to a dramatic increase in global food prices, while any notional environmental benefits are being offset by the clearing of forests to grow the newly lucrative crops.
The production of crops for biofuels is already being talked about as a means of lifting some African nations out of poverty. What if Afghanistan’s farmers could be persuaded to stop growing opium poppies and produce crops for biofuels instead? Such a move could have multiple benefits; reducing demand for oil without diverting land from food production, decreasing the supply of heroin, cutting off funding for terrorists and boosting the country’s economy in one fell swoop.
The farmers wouldn’t necessarily have to stop growing poppies . The poppy can itself be converted into “biomass,” which is the raw material for biofuels. But the fact that biomass can be produced from strains of poppy engineered to be opiate-free would remove the risk that poppies grown for fuel might be diverted to the heroin trade — one of the principle objections of the US State Department to suggestions that Afghan poppy farmers should be encouaged to “go legit” by supplying their crop to the pharmaceutical industry. (State also points out that demand for pharmaceutical opiates is already fully met by production from countries such as Turkey and Tasmania, making the idea a non-starter.)
The poppies for fuel proposal is being looked at seriously by academics and policy think tanks. Australian plant geneticist Philip Larkin has been working on the science with San Diego State University’s Homeland Security program (you can read Larkin’s detailed proposal for Afghanistan here.) And, in an article for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Marc Grossman, former US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs writes:
“There is a potential opportunity to connect the fight against poppy cultivation and the need for new sources of energy. To test this hypothesis, the United States should fund a crash program of international research to determine whether the opium poppy can be turned into biomass for the large scale production of biodiesel and design the necessary technology to do so.”
On the contrary, the West does have something to lose. Even if this idea works, sooner or later we are going to have to let the Afghan biofuel industry evolve on its own, and who’s to say it won’t end up looking more or less like the Saudi oil industry over time? Or perhaps worse yet, effectively taken over by the Taliban, the gangs or the warlords? That would defeat a major purpose of exploring alternative fuels in the first place, which is to achieve energy independence from a part of the world that is otherwise more troublesome than it’s worth.
What?!
We couldn’t look upon poppies as a type of switchgrass?
Bacteria based ethanol production from anything, even poppies, just might be the answer.
http://maxine-log.blogspot.com/2008/01/its-time-to-buck-up-and-implement.html
Decriminalize drugs, give as much as any one wants to anyone who wants it and the problem will solve itself through natural selection.
As long as there is a demand, there will be supply. As long as there is a profit in it, people will supply it.
There is just no reason not to take the profit motive out of it and let things work themselves out.
Helmet, you are missing the point.
The primary issue is that the Taliban and Warlords are buying the poppies from the farmers, turning them into drugs, and then selling them to finance their violence. Legalizing Heroin does NOT dry up the market for the Taliban. If anything it will get bigger initially, since there are so few sources for Heroin given it’s current illegality.
Think about it for a bit longer than you obviously have; It’s not like the major Pharmco’s are going to start churning out Heroin on the day the ban is lifted. Even if they want to get involved in making seriously harmful drugs like Heroin (unlikely), it would take them YEARS to get tooled-up, hooked into the supply chain and producing. Not to mention the MOUNDS of regulation that would surely come along with such a change.
No, the best thing is to reduce the poppy supply by showing the farmers how to make MORE money selling a legal crop. Whether bio-fuels is the answer is something that market forces and brave investors will have to determine.
Joshua,
Maybe you didn’t read the second page – I think I addressed your concern:
‘It’s a bit of a stretch to start talking about Afghanistan as the Saudi Arabia of biofuels. And it might seem an unfortunate analogy, given the precarious position the west is in with its reliance on Middle East oil. The fact is that oil wealth has rendered a generation of young Saudis feckless and open to radicalization, and Saudi money is financing terrorism. However, in this case the Afghans would be producing the raw materials themselves rather than growing corrupt, idle and embittered while foreigners do all the work.’
I should add that, alongside whatever development programs the West pursues, I think we need to continue killing lots of bad guys.
Why would they trade a profitable business for one that requires subsidies?
Wearyman,
Don’t make assumptions about how much thought I have put into something.
The only way for drug abuse to end is for the demand to dry up. The only way for the cash cow to bleed out is to make it legal.
That’s the bottom line.
We all act as if there was no poverty in Islam, there’d be no violent Jihad against us. But it’s clear that when sufficient funds and opportunities are provided,uslims wage Jihad. Could it possibly have anything to do with Islam?!
We are busily working to “fix” the utterly broken societies of Islam without destroying first the cancer which brought them low in the first place, and that is Islam. It is Islam, and the ready unearned trillions which the accident of oil provides which has unleashed this 21st century nightmare of Islamic Jihad. When the rotting caliphate, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed, the incompetent society of Islam had run out of options. It had failed utterly wherever it reared its ugly head — but then oil was discovered beneath the burning sands of Arabia. This began Islam’s century long trudge back from the brink of death.
Now, nearly a century later, we see what the wealthiest Muslim nations do when given sufficient funds and opportunity: they wage Jihad to spread Islam in the world. Whether it’s the Sunni brand, as followed in Saudi, or Shiite, as followed in Iran, the result is roughly equivalent. Terror regimes in Riyadh and Tehran fund global war to spread Islam. Jihad isn’t just the strapping on of bombs, or the flying of planes into skyscrapers. It also involves sending drugs to the infidel to poison his children, the building of Mosques in infidel lands, the paying for Imams in those Mosques, the buying off of politicians, the funding of chairs within Western Academia, the filing of lawsuits to subvert and demoralize, the demanding of “rights” and “respect” for Muslims from infidels, and even the selling of baked goods by little Muslim girls in support of the local Mosque or “Islamic community center”.
It’s ALL jihad. It’s all designed to subvert and harm the so-called “infidels”, and to augment the war camp of Islam. Every Muslim is axiomatically involved.
Poppies for biofuels is a ludicrous suggestion for all of the above stated reasons – but I also suspect that the energy yield from poppies would require gas to be several hundred or thousand dollars per barrel before it makes any sense economically.
Several axioms occur to me;
One cannot extract much blood from a stone, and one cannot extract much energy from a desiccated crop grown several miles above sea level on alluvial moraine.
One cannot expect the tiger to change his stripes, nature forbids it. And one also should not expect Muslims to change their genocidal supremaciet minds as long as they remain Muslim. Islam forbids it.
According to the U.N., Afghan farmers make about $2,000 per acre growing poppies. Which ever crop you want to substitute for poppies, or even buy the poppy crop from the Afghan farmers to turn it into bio-mass, you will have to equal or beat the $2,000 per acre price. Now that’s capitalism! Of course, if the Taliban and/or the warlords threaten the farmers to sell ONLY to them, then what do you do? Well, you can go and kill ALL the warlords. We are already trying to kill all of the Taliban.
I think the money they can make off of opium is only a thousand times more lucrative than the skimpy receipts from growing biomass crops.
It won’t be long before any plant can make opium, coca, THC, or any other desirable drug of recreation or abuse. Genetic engineering won’t stop after it learns to grow biosynthetic fuels and replacement human organs.
It’s only a question of whether genetic engineering will get there first or whether nanotechnology pharma-factories will bet them to the punch. Everyone will be able to grow or make as much dope in the privacy of their homes or storage units as they want.
Better think of another approach to dealing with drugs than suppression of farmers.
Sorry to be so cynical but any plan to curtail or prevent the growing of poppies in the Muslim world is shortsighted.
Do we rally want to get Muslims off dope? Is it in our best interest? Aren’t we better off if they remain narcotized?
Heroin and opium addicts aren’t inclined toward aggression. In fact, they aren’t inclined toward expending energy for any reason. Isn’t Mohamed nodding preferred to Mohamed raging?
Before Western engineers arrived in the Middle East with their noisy drilling equipment in the early Twentieth Century, the Muslims had been sound asleep for centuries. Bad enough we woke the bastards up, why clear their dope fuzzed minds?
Teach them modern farming methods so they can increase their poppy yield per acre say I. May Allah bless them with bumper crops.
Afghans should plant jatropha instead of poppies. Oil from jatropha plant is best right now as alternative fuel especially because of the rising crude oil prices.
Afghans should grow fuel not drugs?Americans should raise straight kids, not dopeheads!
Why not grow wheat, barley or corn for cash. Corn is $8 a bushel stateside>
My only question is this. What is the difference between going to Afghanistan for biofuel ingredients and going to Iraq for oil?
In other words, is there a way that the people of Afghanistan can receive a respectful amount of money or useful goods (food, shelter, etc.) after giving another country the minerals or ingredients necessary to create biofuel. Or will this just be another case where people from a first world country trade with members of a third or fourth world country for a certain substance (diamonds – South Africa, oil – Iraq, minerals for cell phone parts – Congo, etc.), and then the majority of the people in the third world or fourth world country don’t get a fair deal.