More valuable than heroin
It seems some combination of the price falling out of the heroin market and rapidly rising world food prices means that Afghan farmer are converting from poppy growing to wheat. Poor old United States with its multi billion dollar ‘war on drugs’ - all it had to do the whole time was raise the price of food!
Haji Dawood, a farmer who used to cultivate poppy but now farms wheat in the Daman district, near Kandahar in the south, said his family had benefited from the wheat boom. “It’s the first time since I planted wheat that I can afford to feed my family … it’s going well because the price of opium has come down, and the price for my wheat has gone up. Each new season we get more money from the crop than from the previous one,” he said.
The ironic thing here is that grain and wheat farms here are either converting to dairy or growing crop to feed dairy cows. If we were in the same situation as Afghanistan we’d now have cows eating opium poppies as feed stock.
Phot Credit: sirslushy
May 16th, 2008 at 8:28 am
John Maudlin talks about that here:
Food for Thought
/ /
Even fewer seem to realise that if oil prices and agricultural prices continue to run amok, the Asian miracle story, upon which so many investors have pinned their hopes for the next few years, may, in fact, turn into a nightmare. The reason is simple enough. Asian countries are large importers of both oil and food staples. Very large!
http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/ar chive/2008/05/14/food-for-thought.aspx
May 16th, 2008 at 8:33 am
The ultimate wealth could be fertile farmland seas full of fish , fresh water and a low population. However in our highly interconnected world the farmland we see is anyones whose got the money and (eg) China is buying.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am
The free market and globalisation at work to reduce human misery?.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Should note this though:
I suppose one could justify those subsidies based on their effects on the drug trade, but hopefully someone other than the Afghanis is paying for it.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:43 am
they’d be as happy as those japanese beer-fed cows! & make some goooood milk
May 16th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I’m still waiting for a research grant into marijuana honey. However, am happy to volunteer for the opium milk in the meantime.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
DPF’s given this post a mention and linked to it over at Kiwiblog.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Just spotted the link that led to an article related to the Drug War in Columbia.
“The president’s budget proposal asks for another $734 million next year on top of the $2.9 billion already spent.”
http://www.cocaine.org/colombia/drugwar.html
Includes handouts to Big Oil (Jet Fuel), military-industrial complex, AND Monsanto (Round UP), no wonder the the US Federal Government are so insistent on continuing the “War on Drugs” almost as lucrative as the “War on Terror”.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Surely it would have been better to shift subsidies from U.S. agribusiness to those who’ve had their economy destroyed by the American’s interference in their domestic affairs such as the Afghans (Operation Cyclone), rather than giving handouts to already wealthy transnational corporations.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
# mawgxxxxiv Says:
May 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am
The free market and globalisation at work to reduce human misery?.
……………….
Except that it could finish as a leveling exercise for the masses, whereby we go down 10 and they go up 1 and then we meet the limits to growth? How many Japans are possible?
May 17th, 2008 at 9:14 am
wheat is a real b*tch to ‘cook-up’ tho’..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
May 19th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Fair Trade works to provide third world growers with a predictable living income from the kind of crops (bananas, coffee, cocoa, cotton) that are notoriously unstable when in the hands of the free market.
The free market doesn’t care whether growers get a fair deal or not - it is why it has been more profitable to grow opium poppies and probably will be again.
You can’t blame poor farmers for trying to grow what the market wants - but if you want food rather than drugs to be grown, then somebody has to care about the grower.
Fair Trade goods are in the open market, sometimes for a higher price than those produced by the multinationals, but often not - the real difference is that FT growers can plan ahead and know they can survive. It is about co-operation at a number of levels, not the power of monopoly by a few big companies who are not interested in anything but profit.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Janine
The fact that the market isn’t in fact truly free is why its not fair.
Its government interventions such as subsidies, trade tariffs on agricultural and processed goods, quotas, etc etc that distorts the market in the favour of Industrialised Nations and their multinational corporations, which unfairly disadvantages the Third World farmers and processors.