There are more than 2,000 regular readers of this newsletter and if the stats aren’t damned then at least four or five of you take heroin regularly.
If you are one of these unlucky few then this week’s news that the price of dried Afghani opium has crashed from $225 per kilo in 2007 to less than $90 today should be of more than passing interest.
This is due to over-production by the Taliban as these charming ‘students’ (Talib is Arabic for student) have tried too hard to cash in on their favourite crop… which only goes to show it is absolutely correct to hate any form of student.
For the farmers of the region this dip in the price of opium, together with an increasingly powerful Afghan army, a resident UN security force, labour-intensive wages, warlords, goondas, middlemen and the Taliban tax, means they are giving up drugs for food.
Specifically, these farmers are turning to wheat production as a viable alternative to their former harvests, and more bizarrely it is a group of Zimbabwean farmers who were forced out by Robert Mugabe who are helping them do this.
Rift Valley Agriculture is an NGO headed by these men who head off with local farmers to the local badlands to advise on all forms of wheat production and have handed to increase yields by more than 30%, thus increasing the flight from drug to food production.
What does this have to do with India? Not much, except it has always mystified me why India doesn’t seem to have a heroin problem bearing in mind its proximity to Afghanistan. Perhaps closed borders with its bogeyman Pakistan has protected the country from this scourge, menace, never-a-frown-with-golden-brown etc.
I also read it in a three-week old copy of Private Eye and I thought it was interesting. I hope you do, too… whether you’re a smackhead or not.
Monty Munford has more than 15 years' experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism. He is the founder of Mob76, a company that helps tech companies raise money and exit. He speaks regularly at global media events with a focus on Africa, writes a weekly column for The Telegraph, is a regular contributor to The Economist, Wired, Mashable and speaks regularly on the BBC World Service.
