 Felly, ydych yn ffyniadau, mae'n gwybod ymddangos o'r fain iawn. Felly, rwy'n gweithio i'r antyni Heimann Llywodraeth, oedd amddangos yma i'r dr David Mansfield, a'r cyffredin o bobl yn gystafell, sy'n ddysgu i'r afganistau. Fy gennym Ionathan Goodhand, ac mae'n ysgolwch i'r ddysgu ddysgu i'r dyfosedd, sy'n gyrch yn y ddweud o'r Fyfr, mae'r ddweud o'r Cynllun Cymru, ac mae'r ddweud yng ngyfrightd yng Nghymru, ac mae'r ddweud yn cyffredinol ar gyfer y trafod, ac mae'r ddweud yn cyffredinol ar gyfer y gynhyrch. Mae'r ddweud yn gyfredinol ar gyfer y gynhyrch ar gyfer y gynhyrch yn gwybodaeth, ac mae'r ddweud yn cael ei gwaith i gael, i gyd-feydd y maen nhw, ac y dweud o'r angen i'r heimau, gan y sgolwyr afganistau â Ysbryd, mae'r osanau ar gyfer y sgolwyr ar gyfer y sgolwyr a'r ddweud ar gyfer y centre, ac mae'r ysgolwyr yn y gymaint o y dynol Cymru yn ysgolwyr yng ngyrhaf yma ymlaen i'ch gynlluniaeth yma. Mae'r leisio, y leisio an wastebethau, yn ystyried ar gyfer y gadael. Mae'n gynghori'r amser cyllid â'r llwyryd cyfwyr yw'r amser cyllid â'r rai ac yn ystyried ar gyfer y ffrindigol a'r ystyried. Mae'n cael ei wneud o'r gyhoeddol i amser o'r amser ac o'r cyllid â'r amser, a'r ymddangos a'r amser yn y gyfansiwn i hyn yn y llwyte. Ond ydych chi'n gweithio'n ddweud i'w Davies, ond rydyn ni'n rhoi'n ddweud i'r fanfyrdd yma yn ymgyrch yn deudio'r ddweud. Henry Brownwick, os ydych yn deudio, wasddo Henry yw'r amgylchedd y rhai angen o Ancini ac Henry Hyman, ac mae'r gweithio'r amser yn ei wneud yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac mae'n ddweud yn angen i anyen o Uneddynau Llywodraeth o'i gwirionedadol. Felly, rydyn ni'n ddweud yn ei ddarparu reif yn ymgyrch. Rydyn ni'n wneud yn ni'n ddweud i fynd i gael'r amser a i'n ddysgu'r weithio. Felly, nid i ddim gynnwys David. David, wrth am fawr, rydyn ni wedi cael ei Llywodraeth nad yn ni yn rhaid i dweud o wneud amam y dyfu yma'r ystod. Something that is so central to Afghanistan's political economy and to the lives and livelihoods of a major part of Afghanistan's population. As many of you will know, there are few policy arenas in which there is such a mismatch between the evidence base and the dominant policy paradigm. As David himself has repeatedly written, policy narratives around drugs are based on patchy and politicized evidence and flawed assumptions about why Afghan communities are engaged in drug cultivation. Secondly, I'm very happy that it's David who's giving this talk. I think we can very confidently say that there's no one else better qualified in the world to be talking about the complexities of drug production and counter-optic policies in Afghanistan than David. He's now entering his third decade of studying and doing field research on drugs in Afghanistan. He's been to Afghanistan every growing season since 1997, often at great personal risk to himself and the researchers he works with. So he's got unrival credibility in challenging problematic data and policy myths about drugs. Over the years he's produced a stream of very influential policy papers and articles. Through his research, his writing, his consultancy on drugs issues, he straddles the academic and the policy communities. He brings together analytical insights about drugs and also about the real world of counter-optics institutions and policy-making environments. David and I have known each other for, I think, 17 years now. Against his better judgment, David decides to embark on a PhD at SARS under my supervision. He somehow managed to do this alongside his day job. One of the products of this, it's not just of his PhD, but one of the products of it has been this groundbreaking book published by Hearst in 2015. I think it was last, actually to end at the beginning of last year. The title is the title of today's lecture. It's the defining study of drugs, livelihoods and state building in Afghanistan. The book teaches us many things, but perhaps one of the most important messages is that we need to stop exceptionalising and demonising drugs. There's need to reconnect it to embed it within the social context, the political context and the economic context in which drugs are grown and trafficked. The excuse at easy generalisation shows the complex amount of factors that influence the cultivation of drugs and counter-optics policies in Afghanistan. David is going to be talking about a state built on sand. He's going to be talking for about 40 to 45 minutes. Then we'll open it up for questions and we'll finish at 7.30. We will continue the conversation in the reception just outside here. Welcome, David. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Jonathan. It's amazing he still speaks to me after my PhD and my failure to deliver on so many deadlines. It's even more kind of him to invite me to do this. Thank you very much to Anthony Hyman's family for the honour of speaking here tonight. I suppose it's important that I do introduce myself in different ways. Some of the caveats to my book and the work that I've done and the work that I'm going to present here. I've spent, as Jonathan says, too many years, far too many years looking into poppy cultivation. The longer I've been in Afghanistan and the more I've dealt with people in embassies and various other things, and they tell me why people grow up and the more I realise just how slow I must be. Because there's so many simple explanations for poppy cultivation and changes in poppy cultivation. I'm not sure why I have spent 20 years doing it. The work I've done has tried to look at how open bands have been implemented in Afghanistan. From the Taliban band of 2000-2001, bands in Nangahar under Hajidim Mohamed and Gulag Ashurzai. More recently, Daesh in the upper areas of Achi and the southern districts of Nangahar. As well as, of course, the famous or infamous Hellman Food Zone for 2008 onwards. I've also looked at how these bands have affected lives and livelihoods of the rural population in Afghanistan. How that's played out in different kinds of space, different kinds of socio-economic groups. What I've also tried to understand through that prism of looking at these bands is what they tell us about political power and how it's articulated in rural Afghanistan. And subsequently what impact bands have on state building and conflict. And I think that's where things start to get quite interesting. So I'll offer a set of caveats to start with, because I'm just in case there's people in the room. They're always watching, you never know. The first caveat, more of a disclaimer, is that over the years I've worked for, and in some cases I continue to work for, a number of organisations, some of whom may be here, ARU, I work for the Foreign Office for a number of years, DFID, Asian Development Bank and EC. And of course, many years ago, I think when myself and Nancy Fitzhulbert first met, he doesn't look a day older, but I look, well, I've got a lot less hair. Many years ago, UNODC, I currently work for LSE, and I'd just like to be clear that what I say today is based on the empirical work that I've done and I'm not representing the views of any of these learned organisations. Second caveat, I come at this issue from a development perspective, and the work I do is grounded in conceptual framework and methodology of rural livelihoods and political economy. I avoid drugs fetishes and the plague, this sort of obsession that everything can be defined by farmers who grow or do not grow opium. The idea that farmers can be defined solely by whether they are poppy farmers or not poppy farmers if you read the UNODC surveys. The reasons that farmers engage in opium production cannot be summed up on the basis of a single response to a direct question is you'll find in many of those surveys. You often have conclusions that X% of farmers grow poppy because of the high price. Y% grow it because of poverty. Z% grow it because of the need for credit. We never have, actually these aren't mutually exclusive responses, so why do we have this? I do not know. You cannot sum up complex human behaviour in a single categorised answer in that way. So I won't have much of that. This is far more complex. It makes for nice takeaways and headlines. We see it often in the media, but this isn't the reality of what's happening in rural Afghanistan. I think we also see drugs fetishes in the way CNN efforts to ban poppy are analysed, where the reasons for a ban are justified in terms of vested interests, to push up opium prices, a famous explanation of the Taliban ban, make greater profits, the removal of competitors. From my experience, many bans often shouldn't even be seen primarily as acts of drug control. There's a lot of theatre around counter-nocotics. There's a lot of gamesmanship by all of us, not just Afghans, not just the Afghan government and authorities. So I encourage us to look beyond that theatre of counter-nocotics and these kind of claims and look at what farmers do. I use field work and imagery, but there are other ways to do that. Look at the agronomics of the crops. Is it even possible that the crop can grow at certain times of the year in certain locations? Explore livelihood systems. How does poppy fit in with the wheat for the livestock and the household that the household and livestock need? And examine research methodologies, because many present, many of the presentations we have that come from conventional narratives, conventional wisdoms and official narratives on drugs just make little sense. We really need to be far more discernible as we look at the data that we're presented with and we look at the explanations. Because what you come up with is information that suggests anecdote and rumours are circulating as fact than recirculating with academic rigor because suddenly they're cited in a peer-reviewed journal. Examples might be bands that didn't happen, i.e. the Taliban ban of 94-95. And it's a subsequent rescinding of 96. I can't see any evidence that that took place. None at all, but it's in the literature and it is commonly repeated. The introduction of poppy to central helman by Naseem Akhanzada who imposed poppy quotas on people at the risk of torture and death. Why do you need to be encouraged to grow something that works? Why do you need to be threatened with torture and death? And didn't Naseem Akhanzada really have that kind of control? I'd also add the current claims, I'm talking to earlier with Anthony about this, around GMO, Chinese seeds. You know, this is the classic stories that we see that aren't based on an understanding around rural ideas, agronomic realities. So, we need to dig into the detail and not take things as given. Not see everything in terms of drugs and drugs policy, drugs fetishism. We need to understand politics and economics and livelihoods. And these are critical to understanding what is really happening in rural Afghanistan, not just the narratives of the power. The third caveat is that my experience has become increasingly geographically focused within the country. A particular focus on Nangahar and Helmand where field work has been undertaken every six months in Nangahar for 11 years, I think it is. And now we're slipping into a year in Helmand, but ever since, well, most recently looking at the Helmand vote for food zones since 2008, I did used to spend my years in delightful provinces like Gore and Baddickshire, but those days are over. Although when I was writing this book, I was deeply immersed in reviewing my field notes from those times across a number of provinces. And this was incredibly helpful in developing a greater understanding of what, in particular, the Taliban prohibition tells us about the projection of state power in Afghanistan and how bans, since they should be understood, they do, after all, have a lot in common. The tricks of the Taliban will play it out time and time again subsequently. The fourth caveat is the fact that my geographic focus has become very concentrated in the last few years due to the security challenges of doing research in rural Afghanistan. In fact, my days of wandering around rural Afghanistan, eastern and southern, are well and truly over, as are many others. And I'm eternally grateful to my good friends and colleagues at OSDR, ALSIS and ARU for the partnership that we've developed over the years. They've allowed us to dig much deeper into the complex socio-economic political environmental processes that work and really understand the different factors that influence cultivation and how they vary by time, location and socio-economic group. There is nothing that can supplement the kind of imagery work that we have available these days. It is just incredibly helpful when you have problems of access yourself. So, finally, I just want to be clear here also but I'm not here claiming to have a monopoly of the truth. There isn't one. I have a perspective. It's based on experience, grounded in coming up to my third decade of fuel work and data of, I don't know, well over 10,000 household interviews. There is no more than that. But with those caveats at a site, I can safely say I am walking proof that there's a thin line between perseverance and stupidity and I crossed it a long, long time ago. So, with these duties done, that's what we're going to talk about this evening. So, clearly it's going to be OK. I am alas the man who's known for, as the guy that does OK, which can be really misconstrued. But I've actually had someone in DFID one time ring me up and say, use the guy that does opium. Really, can we stop talking like that? But I want to talk about what we've learned from the experience of banning opium over these last two decades in Afghanistan. In doing so, I want to talk about the politics of Afghanistan and how power is articulated, particularly in rural areas, because what we see in the implementation of bans in Afghanistan are multiple centres of power, complex bargains between national, subnational and local actors, as well as international donors and agencies. There are a lot of people at play in here. There's a lot of institutional and individual interests at play and we need to understand more about this. I also want to touch on what these bans and how they are described in their media, academia and bifishals tell us about how we as scholars, academics, policy makers and journalists work in Afghanistan. How we do research, how we verify findings, how we come to better understand the country in its different centres of power, and in particular I want to offer a warning not to overlook the agency of rural communities and their constituent parts to not just accept the narratives of the powerful but to hear the voices of community members who are often not the passive recipients of violence that some might suggest but active participants whose actions and sound effects on stability in political settlements and not just locally but also ripple all the way back to Kabul. And I think this is where the literature I often felt lets as many of us down. These kind of explanations of the haji who told us I can ban poppin. I'll do it tomorrow. Not actually thinking behind what actually, maybe he did do that, but what was actually behind it? How long would it endure? Some of the critical elements around how we work in Afghanistan. What it is to do research particularly as it gets more and more challenging. Now this is imagery. This is poppy probability. Essentially the probability that poppy will be found in various parts of the country. Purple, bright purple being high probability. So you see the bad geese, the helman, the kanan, the lower the distance. In a variety of areas in 2016 this is the centers of poppy cultivation. We are most likely to find it. So what do we learn from banning poppy? First is quite clear. It is possible to ban poppy. And you can do it in a very short period of time. With the right degree of coercion, a lot of bargaining and deal making at the international, national, sub-national and local level. A ban can be opposed on a population that will result in a dramatic reduction across a relatively wide geographic area. We know this. The Taliban did it. Great effect in 2000-2001 where cultivation just dropped out in the sky. We also saw it in 2016 with Daesh and some of the upper parts of Achin, Debala and Cot where they gained traction. And I can show you some of the, it's a bit of Hogyani poppy looking good. There too. The weak is the more even crop poppy is the lighter green. So, hang on. You can see the bans taking place. Taliban ban. How did you do my hammock? Do you like it? And it's down turn here. So we have a number of these bans. I'm using both sets of stats. There is UNODC stats, but there is also US government stats. Debate over which are the more accurate, but I don't think you can actually discuss poppy cultivation in Afghanistan without looking at the desegregated data and who's produced it and understanding the methodological issues around it. In some provinces you see they map each other quite well. In others, completely contrasting to this. Completely. Kandahar, they're like that. Cross-eat children. US is reporting they're coming down. UN is reporting they're going up. You really need to dig deeper. You can't just accept the figures that you see. So, I think what's less clear. We know we can ban poppy, you can ban it quickly. But what's less clear is under what conditions does a ban endure. And what are the implications of imposing a ban where those conditions are not in place? It's here that the repeated fieldwork in Nangahar and Helmand has been evaluated. In terms of enduring reductions, the Taliban ban off as little. They were, after all, fell within a single season. So, it's not possible to assess whether they could have sustained the ban into a second consecutive season, although there are a number of thoughts about this. I, myself, am of the view that the cracks were already beginning to show. I was part of the Taliban ban assessment mission. So we were, the donors were dragged into the country to verify that poppy wasn't there. We went to various parts of the country, Nangahar, Helmand, Kandahar, and looked and... No, I can safely say there's no poppy here. I'm looking at the processes of how it was imposed, and subsequently what consequences were, how they were manifesting at the local level. I thought what we saw was something that suggested severe fragilities in the Taliban regime and the history and nature of the Afghan state. The way the ban was imposed in particular areas, particularly up in the southern districts of Nangahar and places like that, there was some real signs that this was not going to last. I'm also of the view that the Taliban ban in 2000-2001 is the most misunderstood periods of contemporary Afghan history. That has not only led to counterproductive policy when it comes to drugs, but also impacted on how we understand politics and power in rural Afghanistan. But perhaps we can talk about that a bit later. In developing a better understanding of the lessons from banning opium over the last few decades, it's important to break from the habit of seeing things in terms of administrative boundaries and analysing provincial-level statistics for provinces like Nangahar and Helm. You have to disaggregate. In particular, we need to distinguish between areas where the state is stronger, i.e. where there is a history of state presence, social contract, where the state is imposed taxes, conscription and extracted rent on agricultural surfaces. Where economic opportunities for the population exist, these opportunities are actually realised and not just potential. These are the more accessible lower areas. The valleys where the population has better resource endowments, it has access to labour and commodity markets, and here we find local elites whose interests coincide with the national and provincial elites. These are patrons who have successfully concentrated economic and political power and use their considerable influence over rural communities to implement a ban. Now you can think of the cahns of Maman and of Kama or the Arsalawh family in Sukhur. These are people who have been instrumental in helping these bans to be imposed. They control economic and political power and have access to government positions. These are quite distinct from areas where state power is limited, where there is no tradition or of any notable state presence. These are areas where power is dissented and negotiated, where there are not hierarchical rural elites, not patrons but brokers, and where the state is typically sought to manage dissent rather than government direct. This is a completely different kind of space. When we look at the experience of opium bans in the terms of this diverse political topography, rather than through the prism of provincial boundaries, we see quite different responses according to different histories, social structures and resource endowments within these communities. This tells us how different populations will cope with a ban on poverty. If you look at that in a disaggregated terms, you've got a set of districts in Nangahar, some of which seem to be massive increases in population population over the last few years according to you and EDC, and others, cultivation is still a very low level. Completely different responses. So, in terms of success, we see areas like Sukhrod and Khmer, Vesood, where initial responses to the ban imposed by Haji Din Mohammed in 2005. Sorry, I don't have 2005. I'll go on to that bit. Where we saw in those areas, people basically abandoned poppy in 2005 through simple crop substitution. They took up onion in Sukhrod, green bean in Khmer, and that was followed by extensive crop diversification. Help by road building, work on the Khmer intake, and a growing demand for high-value horticulture crops in Kabul and beyond that. We see movements into non-farm income, initially Pakistan, the subsequent jobs in Jalalabad, summer in Kabul, working in construction, and growing number of local employment opportunities. It's Chemptala camp, jobs in the cities of, sorry, various development programs within the districts themselves. We also saw the security premium delivery of services, education, health, et cetera, in these areas. I mean these areas are unrecognisable when you go back to them. We did until more recently see some of these processes at work in the low part of the district of Shinwa as well, where farmers had in the past typically shifted between opium to wheat when poppy was banned, and then straight back to poppy when the ban was rescinded. But over time in Shinwa, you see much greater evidence of high-value horticulture, non-farm income, and there are other places across the east as well. I mean the mehtalams and car guys of this world, in Lugman, where farmers have been taking full advantage of the returns on Gandana, Newcambolettis, multiple crops. The differences that we see in these areas over the last 15 years is quite astounding. Not just the east, we have Dan Daman and of course Argendab. Argendab, we did in 2013 in Argendab. I think it's one of the only places in rural Afghanistan where farmers don't constantly complain. Actually supportive of the government's provision of development inputs. I mean it is an area where you look at the imagery. The place is just awash with pomegranates and grapes. They actually talk about the not area that's not pomegranates and grapes as black land. Almost unproductive. In Argendab, as I say, you see that. In Dandan, the man, you see these farmers who are incredibly responsive to changing prices of different vegetable crops moving between one and the other. We saw the same process as much as everyone talks about the failures of Helmand. We see the same processes in Helmand. You look at the crop diversification around Lashigar. It's just incredible over the years. 2009 to 2012. This is not to say that all farmers in these areas absorb the impact of prohibition very easily. We didn't see collective economic insecurity and widespread acts of resistance in these areas. There's often this talk as if eradication or a ban on opium immediately results in violence and resistance to the state. In some cases that resistance to the state is actually about negotiation. It's actually about trying to access greater amounts of development systems and erodes some further projects and isn't actually about trying to overthrow the state. Where we have seen that, you need to look at it in different terms. What distinguishes the farmers of opium almost seamlessly is, at one, that lighter land holds. Typically fewer dependents within the household. Two, they've accessed a non-farm income. A Zaranj. These great three-wheeled, they've sort of revolutionised the Afghan countryside as a Zaranj. The ability to move between A and B. There's a console that has three wheeled motorbikes that you can transport customers or you're producing. You have one of those. The Pakistani Rupee's Day moving between the farm gate and the city. A shop, a wage, all sorts of non-farm incomes that have actually been critical to help people move out of poppy. Sometimes a salary from the police or the army. The farmers who have made that move seamlessly also showed much greater levels of crop diversification. They're growing short maturation crops, green vegetables, intercropping with wheat. One's growing for food. The other one's growing for sale. And actually we should be comparing not just the unit of land with two crops, a crop by crop comparison. But if I can grow four units of, four crops on a unit of land as a consequence of short maturation peers and intercropping why are we making this false comparison between wheat and poppy in a way that the UN offered? It's an erroneous comparison. It's misleading. It leads to the Hellman food zone and the attempt to replace poppy by wheat. So, these other farmers also have other assets that can be sold which has allowed them to invest in other income streams. I have a number of long-term contacts who have invested their all-gotten gains from opium in buying certain shops. So one does a nice cream sailor in Goresh who did very well out of opium, thank you very much and decided to start the new shop with that. And has again made the move out of opium quite seamlessly as a consequence of that asset that you had to sell. The challenge is that in some of these, in the same provinces where we see reductions in cultivation without widespread economic hardship we also see stark evidence of failure. Of households who are not resilient to abandon poppy and the other shocks that they experience alongside. These are the areas where the Afghan state has not concentrated the means of violence and has no history of doing so and we're viable alternatives to poppy are just not in place. The Sengar valley in Alangar in Lagman or in Nangar it's much of the southern districts bording Pakistan where land holdings are small population densities are high and little crop diversification is taking place. Farmers essentially replace poppy with wheat. But these households can't meet their basic needs through wheat cultivation. They just can't grow enough wheat on the amount of land they have for the population densities they have to feed themselves. So when wheat prices go up they actually end up with a more expensive wheat deficit. And this is something I tried to explain to a number of people on shore others have done the same and it just doesn't go through. This comparison between wheat and poppy just continues to plague us all. So what we saw in those kind of areas were people joining the Afghan National Army but for many it was conscription by default. I mean I have families that we've done longitudinal research with. Some people call it stalking let's call it longitudinal research and they've got four sons who have joined the army year on year and they're not a sign of nationalism or patriotism I think this was a sign of the fact that the family couldn't survive without the income that it brought. They recognized the risks it brought of sending sons down south and when the bodies started coming back that's when they really started to turn in terms of their view of the government. So in these areas in these areas bands have not played out well in terms of support for the government. For example in the southern districts of Nangarha in those areas where Daesh is now penetrated it is now not unusual for households to have one or more son in the ANSF who can't come home and send the remittances but he can't come and visit unless he comes under disguise. Another son or cousin in the Talibah may have a brother working as a teacher receiving a salary from the government family members using the government clinic and school in fact the school attendance has gone up in some of these areas because the Taliban insist the teachers turn up and some of the pupils as well. They're growing poppy and where the household also provides some sort of tax payment chandar or usher or whatever to the Taliban local mosque along with other payments depending on their financial status and their connections of course and negotiation is everything and these things. So you have these incredibly complex hybrid regimes where communities take services from the state some of them which are improving as a consequence of Taliban presence but they grow poppy and they're welcoming the Taliban who after all aren't from the sky their local community members because they allow them to grow poppy. Return to widespread poppy cultivation in Nangarha was not overnight and I can show that that's how seven the ban came in and slowly it starts to creep back initially in the southern district you see it in Shazad there in Horyani comes down into action in 11th 12th by 13th and by 2013 we saw opium openly traded in Shadal Bazar again which hadn't seen since 2007 we saw the return of salam the advance payments on opium and real signs that opium poppy was here to start and where is the provincial the provincial authorities have been in a position to impose a ban on opium or eradicate it in the past by 2013 there was no capacity to impose a ban and no appetite due to the growing insecurity in the southern districts and this was often put down by policy makers showing a lack of commitment so disconnected from the realities of what district and provincial authorities and others were having to contend with in these areas in fact in 2013 what we saw were the authorities requesting the population to acquiesce and allow some poppy eradication so the authorities didn't look bad this was not Nangarha of 0809 or 10 where the authorities could impose their will this was a time when the district and provincial authorities and indeed the ANA were going cap in hand to rural communities asking them to please allow some crop to be destroyed you're making us look bad in front of international donors so the politics shifted as a consequence of the economics and other events that were going on in these southern districts but the ban on poppy was instrumental in changing those politics alongside of course there was the land grab up in Uchin and Nangarha so other events were taking place but it was absolutely instrumental and I'll show you what eradication looked like in 2020 so this is 2012 actually so these are all the events you see the sheer number of people who died 47, sorry, 48 killed most of them in Oriani it's 2012 2013, oh we're not going out there this wasn't about political commitment this was about fear, this was about control the fact that the government had lost control of many of these areas and was much more in a position it wasn't in a position to impose it was having to it almost forgotten its own history forgotten the fact that in the southern district you have to negotiate you've always managed by descent you do not govern directly they overstepped their reach and suddenly they find themselves not even being able to go out and eradicate in the southern parts of the country and this is eradication in 2013 let's take a few heads off a bit of a game it's not really we're not really talking about much so and then the rise from 2012 was dramatic like other bands the population started to realise that the emperor had no clothes the state was not that powerful and when you think of Gulagashazai the idea of the emperor not having any clothes is really not very important but so after being declared poppy free in 2008 poppy went down from from low levels in 09, 10, 11 to just over 3,000 hectares in 2012 by 2013 there was over 18,000 hectares of poppy back in Nangar in 2016 cultivation was about 14,500 hectares but it's only because of the Taliban ban in Nazion, Hock and Achin and if you look at this one this is poppy probability across the southern district but if you look here you can find poppy very little and this was for whatever reasons some various supposition but the Daesh had actually banned poppy the green is primarily any government influence there let's not put it in control and what we've seen is this trickle back of poppy cultivation this is Hogyani district centre of Hogyani and if you look this is the centre the yard field away from the roads away from the main centre of this it's already coming back in 2015 2015 right next to the road sign you can't miss it again the inability of the government to control this is lower down nearer the road but this is in Timloir not that far from the other town and as the military base is closed this is almost like a two year lag from the previous one and no doubt this year we will see a lot more and if you zoom in here you might be able to see it the uniform colour but you see a bit more of a packet so this year 2017 poppy is moving further down the valleys into lower parts of Shinwa it's in Batchicot on so-called government land it's found across Chapao and Upper Suferod and even into parts of lower Suferod along the foothills of the Torgaw mountains and no doubt around Saltypour this year so a lot more poppy coming in Nangahar although the ban on poppy in Daesh areas is thought to be holding something very particular about that we can discuss that in Q&A but I'll be very interested in other people's views on it particularly some of the old Afghan hands that they're here because it really is quite distinct from any other thing any of these other bands that I'm talking about in Helmand there are similar areas where we see we saw little agriculture diversification as well and a high dependency in poppy growing political discontent and a push back into opium particularly after 2014 when the ALP began to look at ways to manage the security situation in the canal command area conscious that they didn't have the backup that they used to have maybe the fact that they had to start doing a deal you look at the probability in Helmand which has also had its ups and downs and you can see somewhere again the difference between US and UN figures they're really quite stark in some ways so again very careful about correlating shifting poppy cultivating with any kinds of events so this is poppy probability Helmand 2008 places of wash high poppy probability places to watch out for I wasn't allowed a pointer I think they thought I might help myself for you with it so you've got central Helmand you've got this area north of the Bogra canal look at this area Farah this is Pachwa and Delarem and then these areas up here now if you move along you can see in 2009 the effect of the Helmand food zone starts to take place here starts to see it thinning into Nelobarexine and go on see it see Farah starting to grow but also these areas massive increases in the amount of land under agriculture in these areas 2012 this is all thinned out still and then 14 by 15 massive increases the amount of land under agriculture by 2016 it's green but this area north of the Bogra it's increased, I'll show that a bit better next slide so we saw rising cultivation in Helmand particularly in the form of desert areas just north of the Bogra canal here just here but also into Bachwa and Nimbos here an area where the afghan state has limited access and where until recently there was very little land under agricultural production at all it was simply desert land 10, 15 years ago let me just show that actually so this shows the expansion over time just that area north of the Bogra canal it's an interesting process it just keeps growing it has this old dip every now and then but this was desert there was nothing there the question is what drove the increase in this desert yeah price, we always go on about price when it comes to opium remains attractive it keeps prices are good this year again but it's not part of the reason success in the canal command area the Helmand food zone the classic balloon effect you squeeze in one place and it expands in another and then of course insecurity this constant attempt to infer a causal relationship between Taliban presence and poppy and as if the Taliban leads the poppy as opposed to the ban on poppy leads to the Taliban that leads to the return of poppy I mean these are complex relationships around the relationship between the secure and the poppy it's often too simply put let's come back to the first two points so the balloon effect stipulates that weather has given demand, you squeeze supply one area simply moves to another we can clearly see this at work in Helmand but it's not just the movement of poppy it was the movement of people a large number of people my back of a cigarette packet estimate the sheer number of people who are living in these desert spaces we've seen 300,000 hectare increase in land under agriculture in the deserts of southwest Afghanistan tell me a development project that achieved that kind of expansion in agricultural land work it out based on the interviews that we have in both Bukhwa and Helmand over many years you're probably talking about 1.2 million people who are living in these desert areas so we've got a movement of people this was we shouldn't just attribute that to the Helmand food zone this was a process already at work since 2002 but with the imposition of the ban in the food zone it increased and what detailed field work both north and south of the Nari Bogra showed is that when landowners in the canal area moved from poppy to a cropping system that was primarily based on wheat in the winter plus a bit of cotton, melon water melon in the spring followed by maize and mung bean in the summer the income spell significantly for the landowner with 10 dribs a land or less he was on about dollar dollar gross income per person per day for a sharecropper they would be on about 20 cents per person per day they were looking at one-fifth of the total yield of lower value crops compared to one-third of the yield when they cultivated property there were clear signs of economic stress in the canal command area in places like western Nadi Alley but particularly in the former desert areas within the canal because some of the areas under the canal aren't irrigated by the canal if you forgive my terminology there is Dashi Ainak or Dashi Shesharaak in these places loss of opium led to the loss of irrigation because they couldn't afford to run their tube wells that meant less drinking water less water for their livestock and significant economic problems so the movement from poppy to wheat cotton maize mung bean if you like as a livelihood system led to a reduction in the opportunities for the land poor created a mobile labour force skilled in growing poppy and anyone who stood in a poppy field and tried to give it a go should know that it is quite child and this was disabled for anyone who cared to look all this why is this a case poppy being grown in the canal there's no need for landowners to employ others to work their land you have to look at the symbiotic relationships between landed and landless when it comes to open poppy this is an incredibly labour intensive crop if Anthony is growing poppy he needs my help if he's growing above a certain level of poppy I work as a sharecroft on his land he's happy for my help I'm happy for the land I'm happy for the water it brings I'm out I have to go and find somewhere else for a house, for water, for land so I move north into the desert and of course I as the landless was least likely to get any development assistance anyway most of the Helmand food zone efforts were targeted at the landed the result is the land poor were dispossessed by the removal of poppy and they headed north where they had access to capital they lease land from those purchased it or taken it already where they did not they sharecroft the land for only a quarter of the crop so they went from a third of the crop in the canal area to a quarter and even a fifth in the desert areas with lower yields the result was I'll show you what the result was massive extension in the amount of I won't show you what the result was because I don't have it monocropping poppy 2010, 2011, 2012 people just monocropped poppy to make up for the losses that they had incurred you had a cheap labour force highly available skilled and they just monocropped the crop so we saw a massive uptake there so that's why we saw this massive expansion into these desert areas and then this expansion of the poppy crop so what did we actually achieve from that Helmand food zone it's also important to note that there's been some dramatic improvements in agricultural techniques in these areas showing that agriculture is neither time bound and that there is a real dynamism within these farming communities and those that service them first we saw the move as I showed to deep wealth and this is knowledge that is allegedly transferred from NGOs and deep world technology coming in from Pakistan this is how people claim it we interviewed a number of these guys who run these rigs and this has made this area possible to grow agricultural we've also had herbicides after 16 years of doing field work we suddenly started to see this when you've got paraquat from Iran you've got paraquat from China broad based herbicides and then started to move into topic which is specific suddenly I can grow more poppy because I don't have to weed as much it's much easier now of course you don't wear any protective gear that would be for softies you just spray it the environmental health consequences of this just we don't know now, and I think this is fascinating now we have herbicides that actually advertise poppy these farmers are all time based traditional agriculture we've got this dynamism here in terms of the commercial developments that are taking place I really need to find out where these labels are designed, I also want to find out but I'm collecting these labels at the moment the other thing that we've seen is solar power this is the reservoir I thought everyone was starting to practice for the Olympics or something because everyone seemed to have these 600m or 1000m2 about a meter to two meters deep they're not lined, there's a big evaporation problem so basically you have these irrigating poppy boy, irrigating the crops let's put it like that and we went from one in one of our locations in 1314 to 81 by 2016 in a 300x300km block in a year and a half there is now 13,000 but no no, agriculture is time-bound, it doesn't change this is traditional farming this isn't Mr Big this isn't the Taliban or some sort of Tony Soprano this is farmers learning, watching each other learning two new techniques clearly this uptake and solar raises serious questions about the long-term sustainability of agriculture and the settlements in these former desert areas and we're doing some more work with IOU this year so to return to the questions to what drove the increase in Bokker, north of the Bokker price success in the canal command area, food zone plastic balloon effect but also let's go back to that question of insecurity here the argument has been that where we have a strong state of poppy, the UK, the US Belgium it's not the same to say that where we don't have poppy we have a strong state governor or indeed a strong head of the PRT or regional command NATO many careers have been linked to low levels of poppy in the last decade and many of these are just shows of strength for example in Nangor and Helmand where the ban pushed into areas where the state hasn't concentrated the means of violence and where viable alternatives don't exist the process of banning poppy undermined the legitimacy of the state it relied on deals with the rural elite and population as well as promises development assistance that have rarely been delivered on it also required the threat of or perceived threat of foreign military power you just look at what happened in Nangor with Gulagosherzai conflating coin and CN in 2007-08 and a significant uptake in US military forces in the run up to that period you look at Helmand with the reductions in the canal command area have actually been achieved without the surge now of our exile in 2009 and 10 Marja where poppy fell from 60% of land in 2010 to less than 5% in 2011 I won't show you that let me show you that's Marja 2008 2009 not a poppy 2010 no eradication there beforehand I was 14,000 marines so that I think we really need to understand this because so often outside see the absence of poppy as a sign of strength it sees it as a projection of power of state power in remote and peripheral areas but locally the population is aware of a process of negotiation the threat of foreign military action that creates the perception that the afghan state is weak we see it as strength locally I say who are these guys I used to say about Golagosherzai who is he, he used to drive to our village now he needs an American helicopter who is this man he's afghan he behaves like an American it's important to recognise that in the southern districts of Nanghar the ban did nothing to aid the legitimacy of the afghan state and Golagosherzai or indeed the rural elite that was seen to have facilitated the imposition of the ban some of those like Malik Usman and Malik Niyaz in Achin who were instrumental in imposing the ban couldn't even travel back to their villages by 2013 they were unwelcome and their rivals actually took power in Helmar the vitriol and profanities used to describe Governor Mangal and his successor Baluch were extreme and certainly not to be repeated in fact it became increasingly apparent in places like Marja Western Nadi Alley and in the former desert areas south of Nari Bogra in the north of Kanal that the state was an entity that was perceived as taking from communities exposed households to shock and this like in Nanghar increased support for anyone that would oppose the effect so in summary I will be quick what can we conclude from the lessons of banning public first they point to avoiding go it alone and see an initiatives eradication coercion not to plant single sector alternative development efforts that might work in isolation of the wider development security and governance effort operating in an area many of these efforts actually undermine many of the other projects that are taking place second it also means acknowledging the impact of drugs on the political economy of Afghanistan and understanding how it impacts on the priorities that have been set in terms of security development and governance we have to stop pretending to give my metaphor that there isn't a bull in the Chinese shop being ridden by a thousand pound gorilla the failure to discuss drugs in today's Afghanistan is just shocking the unwillingness to even reference it is myopic beyond belief indeed the lessons suggest we need to move beyond the point of rhetoric of recognizing drugs as a cross coming issue and actively doing something about it it points to the integration of the drugs issue into the wider planning process the kind of work the world banks done on its agricultural strategy review and certainly adopting a principle of not making things worse considering how development interventions might facilitate an increase in cultivation and looking at ways to counter this I mean I have seen so many projects including the good performance initiative invest in the irrigation systems we are rewarding you for growing profit here is an irrigation system oh two years later there is more land under agriculture there is more poppy and it is higher yielding perfect wonderful we really need to think beyond that kind it also involves building an understanding of the illicit economy in the political analysis of Afghanistan in the same way you can't ignore economy and economy that creates 400,000 direct jobs the opium economy creates more jobs than the ANSF that we care so much about the opium is the most valuable export in Afghanistan by far but we pretend it's not there you can't ignore that effect on the economy but you can't also ignore its effect on political settlements and its effort to end the conflict all these discussions that we have about the political entities and how does this all take place with such widespread cultivation and its widespread trade in this community third it points to these lessons point to moving towards area-based planning where the causes of cultivation how they differ by different socio-economic group are understood, integrated into design and implementation so we don't see five different projects operating in a square kilometre all working with the different agendas and actually undermining each other wouldn't that be an interesting idea fourth these lessons point to capacity building in Afghan institutions and there I say our own offices in country too often we face a UNODC with limited development capacity and a development community with no understanding of the drugs yet they're working in those areas with the best will in the world our own colleagues in embassies and bilateral missions lack experience in both the subject of illicit economies and Afghanistan making it hard for them to support Afghan colleagues that undertake effective planning in bilateral and multilateral programmes say that as someone who's done a lot of work and I've had some excellent colleagues over the years but I've also had some incredibly indifferent ones finally the lessons from banning poppy point towards actually developing a systematic processes of technical review sure that existing and planned programmes are examined and supported so that lessons learned are applied and actually adopted not just witnessed and talked about in meetings God forbid more meetings on lessons learned with more about legacy than actually learning lessons these lessons also mean building effective impact monitoring systems so that programmes are able to adapt the change in terrain and build robust evidence as to what are the intended and unintended outcomes both CNN development of these future efforts I've seen many of an M&E system up close and personal from the Helmand monitoring evaluation project to the independent monitoring agencies of various programmes and I can safely say they're designed to provide good news they're not diagnostics they're not designed to understand what is actually happening on the ground and this leaves the Afghan government donors and programmes blind unable to make the necessary adjustments and delivery where things are in fact going wrong or replicate what is going right and on that I'll call it a day although I do have a nice little video for you if you have the time a bit later thank you