An Environmental History of Opium Poppy in Afghanistan Article Questions Step 1: Read the article, “Flower of War: An Environmental History of Opium Poppy

An Environmental History of Opium Poppy in Afghanistan Article Questions Step 1: Read the article, “Flower of War: An Environmental History of Opium Poppy in Afghanistan” by

Christian Parenti (2015).

Step 2: Answer the following questions.

1. Summarize (in your own words) the connections between water insecurity, food insecurity, social

instability, political instability, economic instability and climate change with respect agriculture

production in Afghanistan. Write a 250 – 300 word summary. Use at least 5 specific examples

from the article. (15m)

i. Use proper intext citations from the article including page numbers

ii. Avoid using direct quotes since this is a summary in your own words

2. In what ways could decriminalizing poppy production be an effective management strategy for

Afghanistan? Answer in the context of Wicked Problem (use the definition and criteria of wicked

problems to answer the question) (5m)

3. Think about your personal connection to what you have read in the article. Answer the following

question: Who am I in relation to this? (5m)

Step 3: Ensure proper formatting before you submit (2m)

This is a list of expectations for formatting, general appearance, grammar, spelling, etc of the submission

• Use a word processing application (please don’t hand write answers – except for graphs)

• Legible – scanned properly, neat

• All answers must clearly indicate which question they are answering

o ie) Q4: answer

• Legible sentence structure, spelling, grammar. If a word is spelled incorrectly, it could indicate a

different meaning or be misunderstood. Please proofread all your work.

• Consistent formatting. Use one font for all answers. Generally, font size 11-12 is the best for

electronic submissions.

• Ensure everything is labelled and submitted as one pdf document when possible.

• No coverpages

• In general, if the marker can’t read, find or understand your submission, it won’t be graded.

• Submit as a pdf. Managing Impacts
What are the social and
economic impacts of climate
change?
What is the human cost of climate change?
Who losses the most?
Socio-Economic Impact – cost of climate change
• From McKinsey January 2020 report
Economic Impacts – costs of climate change
Economic Impacts – costs of climate change
• Example: In Canada
• Costs due to extreme weather
events
• From 2010-2016 spent more on
Canada Disaster Financial Assistance
than in previous 39 years
• Ex: MPB impacted 18 million
hectares of Canadian by 2010
• Ex: Heat wave in 2012 in Ontario
heat wave, then frosts = $100 million
in losses on fruit tree industry
Economic Impacts – costs of climate change
• In the future
• Approximate $25 billion of
Vancouver’s real estate could be
impacted by sea-level rise
• Fish harvests in NWT and Nunavut
expected loss of $3.4 million
annually
• What other costs should be
considered?
Who will be impacted by Climate Change?
Who are the stakeholders?
• Think rural, urban
• Think social, economic, ecological
• Think which countries
• Think demographics
• Think which physical space – water, coastline, mountains, land
A project stakeholder refers to an individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by,
or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project.
-Project Management Institute (PMI)
Who/What is impacted?
• Impacts on people (social),
economic, and ecosystems
(ecological)
• 5 Reasons for Concern
• Extreme weather events
• Localized events
• Social + economic impacts
• Fisheries
• Flooding
• Coral + arctic regions
Who will be impacted by Climate Change?
Who are the stakeholders?
• Everyone is a stakeholder
• Think rural, urban
• Think social, economic,
• Everyone is impacted
ecological
• But some more than others
• Due to risk, exposure and
• Think which countries
vulnerability
• Think demographics
• Think which physical space –
• Not everyone is equally part of
water, coastline, mountains, land
the conversation
Climate Risk
Risk associated with climate
change
• Climate change amplifies
hazards and increases risk
• Greater likelihood of hazards to
happen and/or increase severity
due to climate change
• Exposure + vulnerability make
the impacts of the risk greater to
some groups of people/places
than others.
Climate Risk
3 factors of climate risk
• Likelihood – probabilities of occurrence
of a climate hazard of a given severity
• Exposure – the geographic and physical
factors that lead to some people or
facilities being affected by the hazard
while others are not
• Vulnerability – how prone natural
systems, people and society are to
suffering adverse effects of a particular
hazard to which they are exposed
Uncertainties about future vulnerabilities,
exposure and response of interlinked human and
natural systems are large
IPCC – 5th Assessment
Systems Thinking – Wicked Problems
• “Wicked Problems”
• “The cause end effect relationship that are difficult or impossible to define,
cannot be framed and solved without creating controversies among
stakeholders and require collective action among societal groups with
strongly held conflicting beliefs and values.” (Detoni et 2012:1)
Characteristics of Wicked problems
1. Involve interconnected cultural, socio-economic and political systems
2. Therefore, attempts to solve a problem in one part may cause a problem in
another part
3. Due to size, scale and complete interconnections they are difficult if not
impossible to solve
Systems Thinking – Wicked Problems
• “Wicked Problems”
• “The cause end effect relationship that are difficult or impossible to define,
cannot be framed and
solved without
creating
controversies among
Examples
of Wicked
Problems
stakeholders and require collective action among societal groups with
Food
Insecurity
strongly held conflicting Global
beliefs and
values.”
(Detoni et 2012:1)
Climate Change
Human Population Growth
Characteristics of Wicked problems
1. Involve interconnected cultural, socio-economic and political systems
2. Therefore, attempts to solve a problem in one part may cause a problem in
another part
3. Due to size, scale and complete interconnections they are difficult if not
impossible to solve
Systems Thinking – Wicked Problems
• “Wicked Problems”
• “The cause end effect relationship that are difficult or impossible to define,
cannot be
framedproblems
and solved can’t
without
among
Wicked
becreating
solved,controversies
yet they can
be
stakeholders and require collective action among societal groups with
managed,
and
mitigated
systems
stronglyaddressed,
held conflicting
beliefs and
values.”
(Detoniusing
et 2012:1)
thinking AND applying interdisciplinary approach that
identifies the action in all areas: social, economics,
Characteristics of Wicked
problems
political, technology, and science
1. Involve interconnected cultural, socio-economic and political systems
2. Therefore, attempts to solve a problem in one part may cause a problem in
another part
3. Due to size, scale and complete interconnections they are difficult if not
impossible to solve
What is Systems Thinking?
Systems Thinking – Wicked Problems
Traditional Analysis of problems
• If if you apply pesticide, it will kill insect A which is damaging
the crops. If you get more insects, apply more pesticide..
• Does this work?? If it were that simple, we’d have no crop
losses.
System thinking approach to problems
• Look at the problem from a broader perspective – we can see
one reason why application of more pesticide doesn’t have the
expected outcome. The total numbers of insect A is competing
with insect B and keeping the population in check. When Insect
A is exterminated, insect B’s population explodes and they fill
the niche of insect A.
• Systems thinking is a modality of thinking that keeps a focus on
interactions between parts, with special vigilance to identify
unintended consequences of changes that take place in a
system because of these interactions.
• Reducing the negative impacts to system components
Wicked Problems – Climate Change, Drugs + War
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade
Wicked Problems – Climate Change, Drugs + War
Opioid crisis in BC
• Opioids = class of drugs
includes hydrocodone,
heroin, oxycodone,
fentanyl, morphine
• Some opiates made
from poppy seeds
• More than 80% were
opioid related
• In 2016 BC declared a
public health
emergency
Source: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/resources/notes-and-sources/
Wicked Problems – Climate Change, Drugs + War
Afghanistan
• 32 million people – 78% in agriculture
• Mountainous, land locked
• Arid + semi-arid
• Relies on snow-melt runoff from glaciers for
fresh water
• Over past 20 years produced majority of
world’s opium supply
• Since Taliban fell (2001), poppy produce has
increased (doubled production)
• Poppy production is illegal
• Poppy cultivation requires only 1/5 to 1/6
of water requirements as wheat
Wicked Problems – Afghanistan
Water insecurity
• Severe drought
Health + Food
• In early 1970’s = food self sufficient
• 70% of total crop depends on
irrigation
• Inadequate, underfunded irrigation
systems
• Publicly funded irrigation system
• In 2011, 3 million people in country
threatened by drought + hunger
• FAO estimates high food insecurity
for about 25% of population
• 1998 – 2001, 2009 –
• Cheap projects = evaporation + salination
• Privately owned water rights by
drug lords
• Since 1976 not self sufficient
Source: http://www.mintpressnews.com/global-war-terror-created-heroin-epidemic-us-afghanistan/218662/
Wicked Problems – Afghanistan
•
•
•
•
Economic
Livestock prices decreased
Food prices increased 80%
US invested $30-40 M in antipoppy economic development
• Failed program
• 2013 opium crop valued at $3B
• 2012 crop valued at $2 billion
• Farmers needs to buy water rights
• In 1992, community water managed
irrigation systems sold to highest
bidder
Politics
• Poppy production illegal – no
legitimate economy to safely sell
poppies
• Regular eradication with herbicides
by UN and US
• Lawlessness reduces elements of
trust, cooperation + social
solidarity
Wicked problems are interconnected
Source: https://discovery.princeton.edu/2014/11/14/a-risky-proposition-has-global-interdependence-made-us-vulnerable/
Wicked problems are interconnected
The “solution” may be
thinking about how
these wicked problems
can be managed not
solved?
Source: https://discovery.princeton.edu/2014/11/14/a-risky-proposition-has-global-interdependence-made-us-vulnerable/
Wicked Problems
Climate Change is a wicked problem
There is no perfect solution for climate change
Managing the impacts of climate change through multiple mitigation
and adaptation strategies is the best “solution”
Learning Objectives
• Define climate risk. Identify how vulnerability and exposure varies
between individuals and communities.
• List 2-3 social and economic impacts of climate change. Give specific
examples
• Define a stakeholder. Determine how the impact, influence and interest
of stakeholders may vary with the same issue (climate change).
• Explain using the example of Afghanistan how the climate change is
connected to conflict and drug production/use.
• Describe a wicked problem – explain how Climate Change is a wicked
problem
Flower of War: An Environmental History of Opium Poppy in
Afghanistan
Christian Parenti
SAIS Review of International Affairs, Volume 35, Number 1, Winter-Spring
2015, pp. 183-200 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sais.2015.0000
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582537
Access provided at 20 Feb 2020 22:52 GMT from Simon Fraser University
Flower of War: An Environmental History
of Opium Poppy in Afghanistan
Christian Parenti
Afghanistan’s opium production has soared despite eradication efforts. This is partly
due to a prolonged drought linked to climate change. But it is also due to the collapses
of traditional irrigation systems and the social cohesion upon which the maintenance
of those systems depend. This crisis, in turn, raises deeper questions about prevailing
notions of the “natural” and the “social” as dichotomous and distinct.
F
or twenty years, Afghanistan has produced the majority of the world’s illicit
opium supply.1 For most of this time, poppy eradication has been underway,
supported by ample international funding, technical support, and personnel.
Yet, by any measure, eradication has been a total failure. The United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that the amount of Afghan land
planted with poppy has more than doubled since the fall of the Taliban in late
2001. The 2013 crop was estimated at a value of nearly $3 billion, up from $2
billion the previous year.2
Why this paradox of increasing poppy cultivation even as there has been
a robust eradication effort? The answer involves interactions between social
structures and environmental dynamics; and most crucially, water availability.
Several facts are central: Afghanistan is an arid and semiarid country, yet twothirds of Afghans work in agriculture. Afghan agriculture is highly dependent
on irrigation, but the irrigation system is badly dilapidated. Afghanistan has
suffered a decade-long drought, coinciding with most of the US-led military
occupation, and opium poppy is very drought resistant, requiring only one-fifth
or one-sixth the water needed by traditional crops like wheat. Furthermore,
the drought fits the pattern predicted by various climate models that study
anthropogenic climate change.3
I first stumbled upon the link between poppy and drought—and, by extension, climate change—in 2004, while interviewing poppy growing farmers
in Afghanistan’s Wardak province and again a few years later doing the same in
Nangarhar province. Repeatedly, farmers explained that they needed to grow
poppy because of its drought resistance. “All it really needs is a little water early
on,” said a Nangarhar farmer named Mohammed.
Christian Parenti teaches in New York University’s Global Liberal Studies program. His
latest book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011),
explores the link between climate change and violence. As a journalist, he has reported
extensively from Afghanistan, Iraq, and various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
He has a PhD in Sociology and Geography from the London School of Economics.
SAIS Review vol. 35 no. 1 (Winter–Spring 2015) © 2015 Johns Hopkins University
183
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SAIS Review Winter–Spring 2015
American military and diplomatic personnel on the ground have noted
this vexing link. A typical report from a Provincial Reconstruction Team states,
“Although a mostly dry and barren region suffering from years of drought,
Farah is mainly an agricultural society. Fruits and vegetables, predominantly
wheat and corn, are the province’s staples. However, due to current water shortages, poppy now dominates agricultural production.”4
Creeping environmental crisis forces many Afghan farmers to plant
poppy, even though it is illegal and thus invites state repression. In taking up
poppy, farmers inevitably move closer to illegal armed actors, particularly the
insurgents—the Quetta-based Taliban, the so-called Haqqani Network, and
that branch of Hezb-e Islami led by the infamous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—all
of whom protect and tax the poppy crop.
Political Ecology
Thus, poppy is a plant, a crop, a drug, and a socio-environmental factor linking climate change and conflict in Afghanistan. Or perhaps it does not link
“the environmental” with “the social” so much as it reveals how conflict, like
all human activity, is inherently environmental, as in always already bound up
within ecological processes. War is
War is the product of and, in turn, the product of and, in turn, produces
socio-ecological patterns.
produces socio-ecological patterns.
The sociologist Jason Moore
urges us to go beyond what he calls
the Cartesian dualism that sees society and nature as distinct. He calls for a
unified thinking that posits civilization as a specific iteration of the endless
accretion of organism-environment interactions that make up the web of life.
In place of “nature” and “society” Moore calls for a unified conception—the
Oikeios. That is, seeing the metabolism of the planet, including human activity,
as a whole: “This is nature as us, as inside us, as around us. This is nature as a
flow of flows. Put simply, humans make environments and environments make
humans. And human organization.” For Moore, the social and the natural can
only be separated by “the violence of abstraction.”5
Before Moore called for abolishing this Cartesian distinction, the late Neil
Smith had made similar connections, though in a less systematized and concentrated form. In Uneven Development, Smith argued that humans interacting
with the rest of biophysical reality, quite literally produce nature. By that he
meant the actual physical conjuring and transformation of biological systems,
not merely the “social construction” of their meanings.6
Drawing on Cicero, Smith introduces the idea of “first nature,” or “nonhuman nature,” and a human-made “second nature.” Or as Cicero put it in De
Natura Deorum: “We have also taken possession of all the fruits of the earth.
Ours to enjoy are the mountains and the plains. Ours are the rivers and the
lakes. We sow corn and plant trees. We fertilize the soil by irrigation. We dam
the rivers, to guide them where we will. One may say that we seek with our
human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.” Finally, Smith
An Environmental History of Opium Poppy in Afghanistan
185
superseded both “first nature” and “second nature” with the concept of “social
nature,” which, very much like the Oikieos, posits human life and economic
activity as always already part of the biophysical exchanges that we reify as
“nature.”7
Many others besides Smith and Moore have tackled these questions, but
space does not allow for a full discussion of this literature.8 Suffice to say, this
variegated tradition of dialectic green social thought, often called “political
ecology” or “world ecology,” provides a holistic framework to think about
poppy in Afghanistan.
If we accept this reframing and try to rethink history through the concepts
of social nature, or the Oikeios, then understanding armed conflict demands
that we look beyond unidirectional causality—as in “environmental causes”
and “environmental
effects”—to instead …understanding armed conflict demands that
understand conflict
as a dialectic process we look beyond unidirectional causality—as in
that is social, yet al- “environmental causes” and “environmental
ways bound up with effects”—to instead understand conflict as a
organic, biophysical
flows—producing dialectic process that is social, yet always bound up
them and being pro- with organic, biophysical flows—producing them
duced by them.
and being produced by them.
Climate and Food Security
Although scientists are generally unwilling to attribute discrete weather events
to climate change, the observed pattern of increasing drought punctuated by
more intense and ill-timed flooding in Central Asia matches that which has
been predicted by the world’s major climate models. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary described projected impacts
for “The Middle East and Arid Asia” as follows: “Soil moisture is projected to
decrease in most parts of the region because projected precipitation increases
are small and evaporation will increase with rising temperatures.”9 The next
IPCC assessment confirmed the pattern: “Increasing annual mean temperature
trends at the country scale in East and South Asia have been observed during
the 20th century.”10
Afghanistan, as most people know, is a mountainous, arid, and semi-arid
country and a large proportion of its lower altitude farmland is dependent on
faraway melt runoff from high mountain snowpack and glaciers. This means
irrigation—as infrastructure and social process—is central to the nation’s political economy. I will address this in more detail below.
Historic climate data for Afghanistan is limited.11 Despite this, the US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has Afghanistan
meteorological data that runs from 1939 through 1984. The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has used this data to calculate that, since 1960, rainfall
in Afghanistan has decreased 2 percent per decade, with the spring season
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SAIS Review Winter–Spring 2015
becoming drier and summer and autumn growing wetter.12 While that overall
decrease may be small, the change in timing is also important. Dry spring
plantings and wetter autumn harvests can negatively affect yields by stressing
young plants and molding mature crops.
Since the late 1990s, a pattern of more or less persistent drought has set
in. As SEI explains: “Severe drought conditions prevailed between 1998 and
2001 and are believed to relate partly to La Niña conditions in the Pacific. The
droughts were the most severe of the last 50 years.”13 This in turn translated into
rising food insecurity. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia
University found that in 2000, the Afghan “cereal deficit exceeded 2.3 million
tons” while livestock herds had been depleted by 40 percent in just two years.14
A decade later, conditions having remained fairly similar, the SEI found
that in 2009 Afghanistan was suffering “the most s…
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