Medicines manufactured within Afghan villages from locally-produced opium could be sold on the international market and provide a viable and legitimate source of income for farmers, that compares favourably with that currently available through the illicit drug trade. By leveraging Afghan farming communities’ existing assets of strong social control and poppy farming expertise to locally produce simple poppy-based medicines such as morphine,
Poppy for Medicine projects allow these communities to bring the inherent potential value of poppy back to the village.
Increasing legal incomes
Benefiting from the economic mark-up between the production costs and retail prices of morphine (more than 4,000%), sales of these medicines to the Afghan government would result in cash benefits that are competitive with those offered under both the current illegal market for opium, and the standard daily labour rates in Afghanistan. Licensed poppy cultivation would be a competitive alternative to the illicit trade, offering a means by which Afghan villagers could break links with drug traffickers and with the unwanted risk and expense that illicit trade demands. Furthermore, they would be brought into a supportive and cooperative relationship with the Afghan administration and security forces that would enhance the rule of law in the area in which the village is situated.
Afghan morphine on the international market
If the
unmet need for painkilling medicines in many countries is taken into account, there potentially exists a large market for Afghan-made morphine. The low cost of producing morphine in Afghanistan would mean that the finished product could be sold to individual states by the Afghan government at an affordable price.
Poppy for Medicine project clusters would sell their locally-produced morphine to the Afghan government for USD 3,100 per kilo. These medicines would then need to be packaged (potentially by a corporate entity created by the Afghan government) to meet the international regulatory requirements for the export of poppy-based medicines. By selling the morphine to other states for USD 4,300 per kilo, the Afghan government would not only recover these international compliance costs, it would gain direct financial benefits from
Poppy for Medicine projects.
Cooperative medicine production systems and economic diversification
The most economically efficient way to produce medicines in an Afghan village would be to pool human and agricultural resources through a cooperative production system, allowing the collective purchase of the items required to produce value added products and the redistribution of profits. The cooperative association, as a formal structure, would be regulated by the village shura and would receive a licence to cultivate poppy ad produce medicines. The cooperative would engage and compensate project participants, arrange the local production of medicines and control the sale to the Afghan government. Moreover, the cooperative association would channel a part of the profits into economic diversification projects that would allow the village to become less dependent on poppy cultivation for its livelihood: a compulsory condition of the project would be the creation of a project diversification fund to ensure direct investment in community-level diversification projects and to grant micro-credit loans to individual diversification activities. International development experts would assist in the development of models for economic diversification and business plans.
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