How Did the Taliban Power Grab Change Afghanistan's Opium Economy?

For years, Afghanistan has been the world's premier cultivator of poppy used as the base for heroin distributed in Europe, Africa and Canada according to the key findings of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) World Drug Report 2024, while the Americas have largely been supplied with product derived from poppy plantations in Mexico and Colombia. 

With the Taliban retaking power in April 2022, the new Afghan government instituted a strict ban on the cultivation of poppy, not only curtailing the supply of illicit substances like heroin but also that of medical prescription opioids. As a result, potential opium production dropped by 95 percent between 2022 and 2023 to 333 tons.

As our chart based on UNODC data shows, this change makes Myanmar the country with the highest opium production potential in 2023. The Southeast Asian country more than doubled its estimated capabilities in this segment compared to 2021 and is trailed by Mexico with a potential production of oven-dry opium of 166 in 2022, with estimates for the past year still outstanding. While Laos and Colombia are grouped into other countries in the chart due to limited data availability. However, they contributed to global opium production with 41 tons in 2019 and 18 tons in 2018, respectively.

Apart from the U.S. invasion of the country in 2001, the cultivation of poppy has been a significant part of Afghan agriculture for the past decades, rarely dropping below levels of 2,500 tons of estimated opium produced between 1994 and 2022. While the curbing of the production capabilities of drugs like heroin can in theory be seen as a net positive, many farmers in the country heavily relied on their poppy fields for their monthly income, and the resulting increasing prices for heroin gave rise to new and arguably more dangerous substances like fentanyl.