Business as Usual: The Uninterrupted Illicit Supply Chain across the Borders of Afghanistan
“the virus might kill me in a few weeks, but a shortage of money and food will kill me much sooner”
There is currently a lot of speculation about the impact efforts to counter coronavirus will have on the supply chain for illicit goods and in turn the funds available to armed actors, criminals and insurgents. Particular attention has been given to reports of the closure of national borders and efforts to restrict international trade and travel and rises in the price of illicit drugs in western consumer markets, like the U.K and US. The argument is that border closures and reductions in air travel and global trade along the main smuggling routes are creating shortages and impacting on price and purity.
While this explanation conforms with basic economic principles it does not always reflect the realities on the ground in major drug producing countries like Afghanistan. The fact is in the context of Afghanistan — by far the most prolific producer of illicit opiates — the drugs business has proven remarkably resilient in the face of the pandemic and it is largely business as usual.
Much of this is a function of the extreme levels of poverty that prevail in Afghanistan, particularly in rural areas where illicit drug crops are grown, processed and then transported through. For many of those living in the countryside the perception is one of “the virus might kill me in a few weeks, but a shortage of money and food will kill me much sooner”. So, for example, while there are stay at home orders in place in major urban areas, such as the capital in Kabul and provincial centres in provinces like Helmand, Kandahar, Farah and Nangarhar — all areas where the opium crop has typically been concentrated — and restrictions on travel on some of the major highways, these have had little impact on farmers and labourers who continue to move freely around the countryside.
Moreover, it is important to note the labour intensive nature of opium production means the crop has proven an invaluable source of off farm income for both rural and urban population, particularly during the harvest season — a peak period of labour demand when wage labourers received as much as $12 per day (plus three “good meals), when the Afghan economy was at its most buoyant. The scale of the crop in Afghanistan, the labour inputs required for the harvest (around 200 person days per hectare), and the different micro climates available have created a staggered harvest and as much as 3 months work for those labourers willing to travel from district to district, even to other provinces and regions. For example, the poppy crop of 2019, with an estimated 163,000 hectares would have required 32.6 million person days to harvest, creating as many as 145,000 jobs, Full Time Equivalent.
Initial reports from the countryside suggest that the opium crop in 2020 is likely to cover a larger area and be better yielding than the previous season, thereby requiring even more labour to bring it to harvest, as well as process and trade the final products. With up to a third of the labour days during harvest being hired — the rest from family labour, including women and children — the poppy crop requires a labour force numbering in the tens thousands each year. This year’s harvest in Helmand has seen an influx of labourers from the province of Herat, but there are men from many other provinces as well, all moving across the countryside in search of work, and acting as a potential vector for future COVID-19 infections.
As the poppy crop is unchanged in the midst of the pandemic, the same seems true of cross border smuggling. While there has been considerable attention given to the restrictions on the official border crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan — places like Torkham and Chaman/Spin Boldak — it is largely business as usual in the multiplicity of unofficial border crossings between the two countries. And these are not border crossings where only small amounts of goods pass, they are conduits for hundreds of metric tons of goods per day, and in some cases thousands of people.
Cross border trade through the town of Sasobai, in the mountains of Durbaba, Nangarhar, for instance, continues as before. While this unofficial crossing was effected by the initial closure of Torkham in March 2020 and the prohibition on transit goods — everything from food items like tea, and cooking oil to consumer goods, including air conditioners and even cars — business returned to normal with the relaxing of border restrictions. Once the “front door” at Torkham was opened, allowing these goods to be legally imported, smuggling at the “back door”, in border towns like Sasobai could resume. With 2,500 pack animals — donkeys, mules and camels — typically crossing at Sasobai each day, each with a load of 150 kg, there are almost 400 tons of goods smuggled to Tirah, Pakistan, and subsequently cross decked to trucks for shipment to a variety of locations in Pakistan. Talk of border closures along these routes, and the disruption of supply chains, would be met with derision and laughter, particularly by the thousands of people employed along this route, and the more than one thousand people crossing the border each day, handling the mules, donkeys and camels.
Moreover, one of the primary routes for drug smuggling from Nangarhar into Pakistan, is just a few kilometres further along the border with Pakistan at Tabai and the traffic on this route has seen even less disturbance than at Sasobai. Most transporters in this area carry around 12 kilograms of drugs — cannabis, opium or its derivatives — by bag over the mountains at Tabai into Pakistan. Typically hired by traders in the market hub at Markoh on the main Highway in the district of Shinwar, these individuals have seen little more than a seasonal adjustment in their payment following the harvest and are currently paid US$12.50 per kilogram for their services — which includes payments to the Taliban and local authorities — despite the pandemic, and talk of border closures and stay at home orders.
There are even fewer border restrictions in southwestern Afghanistan where the bulk of the country’s opium crop, and processing is concentrated. The movement of goods and people across the Iranian border at official crossings like Milak, near Ziranj the provincial centre of Nimroz, was not closed by the Iranian authorities during the initial outbreak of COVID-19, allowing both goods and people to move freely through this point. And while the border structures built by the Iranian government along the southwestern border with Nimroz over the last decade, successfully deterred the completely uninhibited movement of people and goods so common during the 1980s and 1990s, rural communities on both of the borders have often found ways to counter these measures and continue to smuggle items such as diesel and illicit drugs since then. In recent years these countermeasures have included the use of large catapults to fire multiple kilogramme loads of cannabis, opium, and methamphetamine over the Iranian border wall.
Anyway, it is still the route to the south and the Pakistan border at Baramcha that dominates when it comes to moving opiates and methamphetamine in bulk. And while the Pakistani authorities have built a fence along much of the Balochistan border, there remain areas where there are gaps, including at Baramchar and Dak — a focal point for people smuggling — where cross border trade continues completely unimpeded.
And as in Nangarhar, there is no evidence that government restrictions such as border closures and stay at home orders, has impacted on smuggling. There is certainly no premium being paid to those transporting drugs along these routes. The “rent” for transporting a kilogram of drugs the 150 kilometres from the poppy growing areas and labs of Bakwa in Farah to the Iranian border at Kang continues to be only $10; while those taking the longer 250 kilometre route from the former deserts of places like Nad e Ali in Helmand, to Baramcha, have been paid the same for months, only S$ 20 per kilogram.
Although, these illicit economies continue to cross the Afghan borders into Iran and Pakistan — and possibly other neighbouring countries uninhibited- this is not to say that COVID-19 and efforts to curtail it will not have an impact on the illicit drugs business in the future. The most obvious effect is if restrictions continue at the formal border crossings, there may be a rise in the cost of legal inputs required for illicit drug production. For example, food prices in Afghanistan are already increasing by as much as 30 per cent due to the limits currently placed on importing goods at Torkham. It seems likely that the price of other inputs, including those used in the cultivation of opium — such as fertiliser, herbicides, even solar panels and generators — will rise as well, inflating the cost of opium production during the next growing season, that begins in the fall of 2020.
More immediately, it is likely that the price of opiate and methamphetamine production will rise in Afghanistan. Both drugs require a variety of legal inputs including iodine, ammonium chloride, toluene, sodium carbonate, caustic soda, as well as a hotch potch of equipment, such as plastic and metal bowls and buckets, presses, generators and other items, all of which will become more expensive if the restrictions at formal borders continue, or are ratcheted up. This in turn could affect prices further downstream — although considering just how negligible production costs in Afghanistan are compared to the price at which heroin is sold in markets like the UK, the effect would be insignificant.
As such, it is hard to reconcile recent reports of increases in the price of drugs in western consumer nations with any border restrictions in source countries like Afghanistan. Unless there are effective controls further downstream — in places like Turkey or the Balkans — all of whom, one would assume, have their own unofficial crossings to exploit — the most likely explanation for current price rises lay with “price gouging” by drugs traders looking to take advantage of concerns over availability to increase their profits.
The impact of the unfolding health crisis in Afghanistan is much harder to predict. It is clear official counts of COVID-19 by the Afghan government significantly underestimate the scale of infection, particularly in the rural areas where health services are basic and population data is particularly poor. Reports of an increasing numbers of deaths in some rural areas are already circulating, although, as yet, there is little sense of the veracity of these claims, and currently little scope for testing, or examining subsequent infections in rural communities. There are also questions over what the Afghan government can do in the wake of a significant outbreak of the virus in the countryside, given the ongoing conflict, current resource constraints and the prospects of further cuts in aid from a US administration that appears to be looking for a way out.
As governments in the global north try and balance the demands of a public health crisis and the impact of a failing formal economy and growing public pressures to “open up” despite the risks, those in the global south — with scarce funds and inadequate social nets — are more likely to require their citizens to draw on the informal economy, including illicit activities. It can be argued that the Afghan government has often had to tolerate the illegal economy — what has been referred to as “forebearance” — and recognise the role activities like opium production and smuggling plays as a form of subsidy, particularly to under served rural communities and border areas. This has meant that national, provincial and local authorities have often been uneasy about pursuing punitive action and enforcing the law, conscious of the risk of violent unrest and undermining their legitimacy. Ultimately, in the face of a growing pandemic, the evidence leans more towards an illicit economy that will thrive, rather than one deterred by the kind of controls governments are currently imposing on their borders.
David Mansfield, Consultant, Author: “State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan”
Photographs and imagery: Alcis, OSDR and Mansfield.
