Economics, Opium, and Fairytales
One of the things you try to avoid if you are more interested in happy endings somewhere over the rainbow than stereos and a new living room set is thinking about economics. Economics is about money, and to a romantic, money is crass if not downright dangerous. It cheapens the eye, fills the mind with greed and covetousness, and turns the mind from the heavens to things of the earth. Like buying cool sweaters or paying off your student loan. Oops, guilty. Coming halfway around the world with vaguely romantic notions of helping people hasn’t rid my soul of economic scheming. Try living, and you’ll notice quickly that most of your problems have money in them somewhere, while you, more to the point, don’t have enough. It’s the same when you start trying to help people with their problems; they don’t have money either. So at some point we need to think about economics. It helps with helping people, and it also helps with acquiring sweaters and paying off student loans.
If my heart were as wild and free as I like to pretend it is, I would say “hang it all, I’m going to fling off my loans, hand out my sweaters at Main and Hastings, and dwell with the poor, craft poetry, and start building heaven.” But try telling that to the banker to whom you owe your university education, or to the Afghan trying to feed his ten children and pay off his mortgage. The world may need dreamers, but interest also needs to be paid, and kids need food, and dreams aren’t usually good currency. I’ve still got a crack-brained notion that heaven is more real than this thing called the “real world” that people keep shaking at me, but heaven doesn’t pay the bills, so I’ve been forced to come out of it for awhile and notice how things work on this side of the rainbow, in the so-called real world.
Since I’m in Afghanistan, I’ll start with the opium trade. It’s big business here. At harvest time, the drug traders set up whole markets and trade goods for opium. Two kilos for a goat, etc. Opium is good currency; it’s portable and dependably pegged to something with good market value, while the local currency unfortunately isn’t quite soft enough to wipe your nose with. Besides, opium is easy to come by. Kids can run through the fields at harvest time, scrape off a bit of the brown gold into a baggy, and trade it in for an ice cream. (I’m not lying about this; next time you see your parents, tell them they were wrong – money does grow on … well, not trees, but flowers, at least).
But the business of opium, like all great capital ventures since the Industrial Revolution, creates an ethical mess. The reasons for this might be pretty clear to us. Drugs are bad no matter how many mouths the money from them feeds, just like working kids to death at the ripe old age of 11 in the textile mills was bad, no matter how much more they clothed the populace. But if you’re feeding the mouths, or counting the take from a day at the factory, you might not see it like this. Let me take you through it a different way. You probably like your Nikes, right? Do you chuck them out and switch to recycled tire tread sandals when you find out an eight year old in Thailand spent 14 hours in sub-human conditions to make them? If you’re like most of us, probably not. You keep jogging around the seawall, Nike keeps selling shoes, and the kid keeps sewing on swooshes. We tend to think we’re not responsible for things we can’t see, and seeing a program once on TV about the kids in Thailand doesn’t count.
It’s the same here. The farmers here might know about all the addicts whose lives are ruined by what they’re growing, but they’re not rubbing shoulders with them everyday. Besides, there’s a great market for opium products and no (enforced) laws against growing it. So really, it’s a great way to shoe your kids, put food in their bellies, and buy a new house while you’re at it. You see the problem. The moral route through the situation is a tricky one: heroin addicts on one hand, hungry kids on the other. If yours are the hungry kids, you may be tempted to look at things economically rather than morally, and the economics are quite simple. Growing poppy makes sense.
It makes the most sense when you’re starving. While I was in Baharak last week, I talked with a man who works for the British Foreign Service and who shall remain nameless in the fine tradition of British agents – we’ll call him “Bond”. His job is to research the economics of the drug trade in Afghanistan. He said that people started growing poppy here because of the drought three years ago. The kids were going hungry and everyone was broke. Well, almost everyone was broke. A few wealthy men decided to help out everyone else by giving them mortgages for their land to pay off their debts. Then these philanthropists allowed people to sharecrop on their mortgaged land and take 50% of the profits. They told them to grow poppy so that the profits would be high. Then they dropped the penny. To buy back their land the farmers would have to pay double the mortgage. If the farmers had enough land so that their 50% of the take would give them enough to feed their family and start paying off the mortgage, or if they hadn’t mortgaged all their land and kept a bit to grow their own crop, they will be able to slowly crawl out of debt. The rest are out of luck, and the rest are most people.
Most people don’t grow poppy because they want more TVs and, as long as they get to watch music videos on satellite from Pakistan, don’t give a rip about the addicts on the streets of the “civilized” nations. They do it because they’re skint, starving, and the guy who now owns their land is telling them they have to. He’s the one with satellite dish. He’s the one with everything, really. Because of all the land mortgages, parts of the province are almost feudal. In some places one village owns the next one, and in Baharak a privileged few own most of the land in the district and quite a bit in the surrounding districts as well. When the civilized nations come and walk through the poppy fields, trying to solve their own domestic drug problem by shaking pious fingers at the farmers, the glutted few aren’t there. They’re watching TV.
And they’re not the only ones. We’re all watching TV, too, maybe trying to forget the smack addict shivering outside the door. Economically speaking, our countries are the market, so it turns out that a big part of this problem – ethically speaking - is ours. We’re trying to solve it by running over to Afghanistan and telling the poppy farmers to just quit it already because they’re ruining our neighbourhoods. Or better yet, we get our governments to run over, so we can keep watching Friends. But you don’t solve the problems of your own ruined people by ruining the lives of other people far away. Well, actually, historically speaking, that is how you do it, but it’s not exactly a shining moral victory, is it?
People do what they can to get out of debt. Afghans grow poppy. I do aid work. They do what they do because Lord knows growing wheat will ruin them and the UN will bring more anyway. I do what I do because the pay is good and the holiday options in this part of the world are better. Scratch most of us, and there’s money underneath our reasons for doing things. That’s the economics part. People also do things for less cynical reasons. The Afghan farmers are trying to feed their kids, and I’m trying to make the world a better place. You’re reading this, so you must care a little too. We’re all practically in cahoots. So what about the damned poppy?
A lot has to happen, and it has to happen all at once, in perfect synchronization, or it won’t work. If you’ve been paying attention to anything I’ve been saying about how things work – or don’t – in this country, you’ll be shaking your head before I even go into detail about this. “Perfect” and “synchronization” are two words they don’t use much here, and they never use them together. So basically, this won’t work. But if it did, here’s how it would go …
“Mr. Bond” says growing poppy in Afghanistan is a high-profit, low-risk venture, which means it pays a lot and there’s not much in the way of deterrents when you do it. Growing wheat, on the other hand, is a low-profit, high-risk venture, which means the UN hands out wheat so why should anyone pay us for it?, the soil’s not that great and if the crop fails we’re probably all going to die, and someone else owns our land, so we can’t grow what we want anyway, even if we wanted to grow wheat, which we don’t (see above). So what has to happen is that growing poppy has to become a lot more risky while growing wheat simultaneously becomes profitable and risk-less enough for people to switch. In practical terms, this means the Afghan government has to actually enforce their anti-drug laws instead of trotting them out on special occasions, like when other governments offer to give them money. At the same time, we have to pump millions of dollars of aid into community development, agriculture practice, water supply, health care, and the like so that people can get the basics of what they need while growing wheat instead of dope. And while all that’s happening, people need a bail-out plan for their land mortgages so the greedy opium barons will stop squeezing them in the vice, stop watching TV, and start doing something useful, like trying to avoid the new law enforcement.
Yeah, right. Maybe I should just pay off my loan and get out of here. Maybe you should go back to watching Friends. Maybe we should just let them grow poppy in Afghanistan and shoot up on Hastings.
Unless.
Unless, that is, you believe in such silliness as doing something even if it’ll never work. Despite our practical, irony-laced culture, I think we secretly hold hair-brained hopes about things like this. It’s just that we do it with kind of stupid things. We sit white-knuckled and tipsy in the sports bar, willing the hapless Canucks to crawl their way back to a sudden death over time goal to take the semi-final game. (I’d say “final game” but the Canucks don’t ever make it … wait, they did once, and I think the sleepy Vancouverites rioted - my point remains). We still buy lottery tickets, and some of us still go to nightclubs, hoping to meet someone, although the odds of winning at either game are the same: very bad. Even though we don’t believe in fairy-tales, Disney still sells like hotcakes. So if we can do it for this kind of tripe, why not for starving farmer’s kids and the addicts in the neighbourhood?
There I go again, back to the fairytales, and I really wanted to talk economics. I’m sure there’s a way of describing this with market equations so that it’s a bad idea economically to grow poppy, but by the time the farmers here understand it, they’ll be dead of starvation – or boredom. In the meantime, we’ll keep plugging away with our hopeless programs and flaky government and hang on for the happily ever after, even against the odds. If you want something to do over there, you could invite the local addict home for dinner and see if he maybe he started out needing a friend and ended up with a needle. It’ll be a long road back to the friend, but it’ll take us awhile to sort out this poppy thing here, so you’ve got time.
If my heart were as wild and free as I like to pretend it is, I would say “hang it all, I’m going to fling off my loans, hand out my sweaters at Main and Hastings, and dwell with the poor, craft poetry, and start building heaven.” But try telling that to the banker to whom you owe your university education, or to the Afghan trying to feed his ten children and pay off his mortgage. The world may need dreamers, but interest also needs to be paid, and kids need food, and dreams aren’t usually good currency. I’ve still got a crack-brained notion that heaven is more real than this thing called the “real world” that people keep shaking at me, but heaven doesn’t pay the bills, so I’ve been forced to come out of it for awhile and notice how things work on this side of the rainbow, in the so-called real world.
Since I’m in Afghanistan, I’ll start with the opium trade. It’s big business here. At harvest time, the drug traders set up whole markets and trade goods for opium. Two kilos for a goat, etc. Opium is good currency; it’s portable and dependably pegged to something with good market value, while the local currency unfortunately isn’t quite soft enough to wipe your nose with. Besides, opium is easy to come by. Kids can run through the fields at harvest time, scrape off a bit of the brown gold into a baggy, and trade it in for an ice cream. (I’m not lying about this; next time you see your parents, tell them they were wrong – money does grow on … well, not trees, but flowers, at least).
But the business of opium, like all great capital ventures since the Industrial Revolution, creates an ethical mess. The reasons for this might be pretty clear to us. Drugs are bad no matter how many mouths the money from them feeds, just like working kids to death at the ripe old age of 11 in the textile mills was bad, no matter how much more they clothed the populace. But if you’re feeding the mouths, or counting the take from a day at the factory, you might not see it like this. Let me take you through it a different way. You probably like your Nikes, right? Do you chuck them out and switch to recycled tire tread sandals when you find out an eight year old in Thailand spent 14 hours in sub-human conditions to make them? If you’re like most of us, probably not. You keep jogging around the seawall, Nike keeps selling shoes, and the kid keeps sewing on swooshes. We tend to think we’re not responsible for things we can’t see, and seeing a program once on TV about the kids in Thailand doesn’t count.
It’s the same here. The farmers here might know about all the addicts whose lives are ruined by what they’re growing, but they’re not rubbing shoulders with them everyday. Besides, there’s a great market for opium products and no (enforced) laws against growing it. So really, it’s a great way to shoe your kids, put food in their bellies, and buy a new house while you’re at it. You see the problem. The moral route through the situation is a tricky one: heroin addicts on one hand, hungry kids on the other. If yours are the hungry kids, you may be tempted to look at things economically rather than morally, and the economics are quite simple. Growing poppy makes sense.
It makes the most sense when you’re starving. While I was in Baharak last week, I talked with a man who works for the British Foreign Service and who shall remain nameless in the fine tradition of British agents – we’ll call him “Bond”. His job is to research the economics of the drug trade in Afghanistan. He said that people started growing poppy here because of the drought three years ago. The kids were going hungry and everyone was broke. Well, almost everyone was broke. A few wealthy men decided to help out everyone else by giving them mortgages for their land to pay off their debts. Then these philanthropists allowed people to sharecrop on their mortgaged land and take 50% of the profits. They told them to grow poppy so that the profits would be high. Then they dropped the penny. To buy back their land the farmers would have to pay double the mortgage. If the farmers had enough land so that their 50% of the take would give them enough to feed their family and start paying off the mortgage, or if they hadn’t mortgaged all their land and kept a bit to grow their own crop, they will be able to slowly crawl out of debt. The rest are out of luck, and the rest are most people.
Most people don’t grow poppy because they want more TVs and, as long as they get to watch music videos on satellite from Pakistan, don’t give a rip about the addicts on the streets of the “civilized” nations. They do it because they’re skint, starving, and the guy who now owns their land is telling them they have to. He’s the one with satellite dish. He’s the one with everything, really. Because of all the land mortgages, parts of the province are almost feudal. In some places one village owns the next one, and in Baharak a privileged few own most of the land in the district and quite a bit in the surrounding districts as well. When the civilized nations come and walk through the poppy fields, trying to solve their own domestic drug problem by shaking pious fingers at the farmers, the glutted few aren’t there. They’re watching TV.
And they’re not the only ones. We’re all watching TV, too, maybe trying to forget the smack addict shivering outside the door. Economically speaking, our countries are the market, so it turns out that a big part of this problem – ethically speaking - is ours. We’re trying to solve it by running over to Afghanistan and telling the poppy farmers to just quit it already because they’re ruining our neighbourhoods. Or better yet, we get our governments to run over, so we can keep watching Friends. But you don’t solve the problems of your own ruined people by ruining the lives of other people far away. Well, actually, historically speaking, that is how you do it, but it’s not exactly a shining moral victory, is it?
People do what they can to get out of debt. Afghans grow poppy. I do aid work. They do what they do because Lord knows growing wheat will ruin them and the UN will bring more anyway. I do what I do because the pay is good and the holiday options in this part of the world are better. Scratch most of us, and there’s money underneath our reasons for doing things. That’s the economics part. People also do things for less cynical reasons. The Afghan farmers are trying to feed their kids, and I’m trying to make the world a better place. You’re reading this, so you must care a little too. We’re all practically in cahoots. So what about the damned poppy?
A lot has to happen, and it has to happen all at once, in perfect synchronization, or it won’t work. If you’ve been paying attention to anything I’ve been saying about how things work – or don’t – in this country, you’ll be shaking your head before I even go into detail about this. “Perfect” and “synchronization” are two words they don’t use much here, and they never use them together. So basically, this won’t work. But if it did, here’s how it would go …
“Mr. Bond” says growing poppy in Afghanistan is a high-profit, low-risk venture, which means it pays a lot and there’s not much in the way of deterrents when you do it. Growing wheat, on the other hand, is a low-profit, high-risk venture, which means the UN hands out wheat so why should anyone pay us for it?, the soil’s not that great and if the crop fails we’re probably all going to die, and someone else owns our land, so we can’t grow what we want anyway, even if we wanted to grow wheat, which we don’t (see above). So what has to happen is that growing poppy has to become a lot more risky while growing wheat simultaneously becomes profitable and risk-less enough for people to switch. In practical terms, this means the Afghan government has to actually enforce their anti-drug laws instead of trotting them out on special occasions, like when other governments offer to give them money. At the same time, we have to pump millions of dollars of aid into community development, agriculture practice, water supply, health care, and the like so that people can get the basics of what they need while growing wheat instead of dope. And while all that’s happening, people need a bail-out plan for their land mortgages so the greedy opium barons will stop squeezing them in the vice, stop watching TV, and start doing something useful, like trying to avoid the new law enforcement.
Yeah, right. Maybe I should just pay off my loan and get out of here. Maybe you should go back to watching Friends. Maybe we should just let them grow poppy in Afghanistan and shoot up on Hastings.
Unless.
Unless, that is, you believe in such silliness as doing something even if it’ll never work. Despite our practical, irony-laced culture, I think we secretly hold hair-brained hopes about things like this. It’s just that we do it with kind of stupid things. We sit white-knuckled and tipsy in the sports bar, willing the hapless Canucks to crawl their way back to a sudden death over time goal to take the semi-final game. (I’d say “final game” but the Canucks don’t ever make it … wait, they did once, and I think the sleepy Vancouverites rioted - my point remains). We still buy lottery tickets, and some of us still go to nightclubs, hoping to meet someone, although the odds of winning at either game are the same: very bad. Even though we don’t believe in fairy-tales, Disney still sells like hotcakes. So if we can do it for this kind of tripe, why not for starving farmer’s kids and the addicts in the neighbourhood?
There I go again, back to the fairytales, and I really wanted to talk economics. I’m sure there’s a way of describing this with market equations so that it’s a bad idea economically to grow poppy, but by the time the farmers here understand it, they’ll be dead of starvation – or boredom. In the meantime, we’ll keep plugging away with our hopeless programs and flaky government and hang on for the happily ever after, even against the odds. If you want something to do over there, you could invite the local addict home for dinner and see if he maybe he started out needing a friend and ended up with a needle. It’ll be a long road back to the friend, but it’ll take us awhile to sort out this poppy thing here, so you’ve got time.
posted by rjs | 9:36 PM
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