考博英语阅读理解泛读：Everywhere coming up poppies

头戴博士帽

考博英语阅读理解泛读：Everywhere coming up poppies

【华慧考博网】THE United Nations has published this year’s forecast for the Afghan opium crop and the news is not good. The annual poppy harvest begins soon, and despite all the efforts to reduce cultivation, it looks likely to rise yet again. The harvest in nine of the growing provinces will probably increase and it is expected to remain steady in about in another eight. In only one of Afghanistan’s provinces does it looks set to fall, according to the forecast.

Cultivation is still lower than when it was at its peak, in 2007, but the nationwide trend now looks to be moving in the wrong direction. This year’s bumper crop means that Afghanistan’s heroin will continue to feed an exploding population of addicts within the country’s own borders as well as in neighbouring Russia and Iran. Taliban coffers will swell with the proceeds and everywhere the drug money will poison attempts to build an Afghan state. Helmand, which alone grew nearly half of Afghanistan’s opium in 2011 and is the focus of the most intensive counter-narcotics push, is one of those provinces where production is unlikely to change.

Sky-high opium prices are being blamed for the recent backsliding. Other factors, including such familiar conditions as poverty, insecurity, corruption and government complicity, all continue to play their bleak roles. In Helmand they conspired to undermine what progress was made by the British government’s “food zone” initiative.

Under that plan farmers are subsidised to grow alternative crops—while the energetic provincial governor threatens to tear up their poppy if they don’t. The food zone covers areas of central Helmand where security conditions have improved with an influx of British, American and other foreign troops. The initiative has enjoyed some success cutting cultivation in the areas where it is implemented.

So the drug lords who have seen their trade threatened in the food zone have upped sticks to the north of the province, or to neighbouring Farah. In relatively insecure areas, beyond the reach of Helmand’s governor and his international allies, they have struck deals with the Taliban, dug new wells and carried on. The most powerful drug-trading families have significant political clout.

“The gains we are making in the heartland might be undone in the north,” laments Jean-Luc Lemahieu, director of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.
“It’s an excellent illustration of the collusion between the powerful in Lashkar Gah [Helmand’s capital] and the Taliban who control that area.” Afghan counter-narcotics officials fear that as foreign troops withdraw more and more areas will be similarly put out of reach of their programmes.

The UN’s latest report (and other gloomy prognoses) will encourage observers who advocate buying up the lot in order to implement a licensing system to feed the demand for medical painkillers. Defenders of the existing programme think that would only encourage more farmers to grow more opium, turning the country into a vast narco-welfare state. Where the drug trade is so lucrative, they argue, the most entrenched traffickers could easily match any legalised price.

Mr Lemahieu believes there are no quick fixes. As he sees it the war on opium in Afghanistan has decades left to run and might well get worse before it gets any better.

Increasing the security and quality of life of Afghan farmers is the key. “This is the cure of the disease,” he says. His is hardly a prescription for fatalism however. “Strong medication is required at this stage too. Its brand name is ‘political will’.”