How Much Opium Did Afghans Harvest in 2023 After the Taliban Ban?

The Taliban unquestionably have drastically reduced opium poppy cultivation during the 2022-2023 growing season, roughly duplicating the percentage reduction they achieved in 2000-2001 when they were previously in power. This year’s poppy harvest is orders of magnitude smaller than last year’s and is much lower than in any year since the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) started producing estimates in 1994, except for 2001. But there are widely different figures on how much opium cultivation remained this year after the effective Taliban ban was imposed, notably those of UNODC and Alcis, a geographic information services company that has been actively working on Afghanistan’s opium sector for a number of years. 

This data gap needs to be resolved since there is an important difference between poppy being virtually wiped out all over the country versus significant cultivation remaining concentrated in certain areas. The answer to this question sheds light on the Taliban—how they govern and implement core policies, the prospects for the coming year with the opium ban by all indications continuing, and the economic and potential political fallout that the ban may cause for the Taliban. 

Despite some early skepticism about how seriously the Taliban would implement the opium ban announced by their top leader in April 2022 (fed by the Taliban’s limited actions against the 2022 crop, harvested at around the time the ban was announced), there is now no dispute that poppy cultivation has decreased sharply and is a small fraction of the 2022 harvest. Farmers in key opium-producing areas—most notably Helmand, which saw a more than 99 percent reduction in cultivation—responded to the edict and Taliban enforcement efforts by not planting poppy. Where there was resistance, some eradication of fields occurred but accounting for only a small proportion of the total reduction in the opium cultivated area.

However, the two publicly available estimates of the remaining opium harvest in 2023 differ greatly. UNODC’s recently published Afghanistan Opium Survey estimates that overall national poppy cultivation declined by 95 percent, whereas satellite imagery analysis by Alcis indicates an 86 percent reduction in cultivation. 

This roughly 10-percentage-point gap between estimated changes in poppy cultivation would not have been a big deal if the absolute magnitude of the change were not so large, since it might result in something like a 15- to 30-percent difference in the estimated total area of cultivation for a given year. Past conflicting estimates of poppy cultivation often have differed by this much, and indeed, the UNODC’s stipulated margin of error in their cultivation estimates has often been in this range. The implications of these differences for understanding the situation of the opium sector and for policy were limited.

However, with the enormous decrease in planting in 2023, the sheer arithmetic translates into a three-to-one difference in the estimated 2023 poppy harvest—10,800 hectares according to UNODC versus 31,088 hectares according to Alcis. This large difference in the estimated residual opium cultivated area importantly affects our understanding of how and how effectively the ban was implemented, even though neither estimate detracts from its overall effectiveness. Few if any observers would have predicted an 80-percent-plus reduction in 2023 when the ban was originally announced in March 2022. 

One province, Badakhshan, accounted for more than two-thirds of the 20,000-plus hectare difference in the national estimates. UNODC estimates cultivation in Badakhshan at only 1,600 hectares, a 63 percent reduction from their estimate for 2022, whereas Alcis’s figure is 15,388 hectares, a 12 percent increase over 2022. There are also substantial, albeit smaller, differences in the figures for other provinces.  

What Is the Bottom Line?

The key in assessing which of the two figures better reflects reality on the ground is understanding the different methodologies deployed in estimating opium poppy cultivation in 2023. The UNODC used its long-standing method of relying on samples in the major opium-producing provinces while targeting key areas in other provinces. Alcis, by contrast, analyzed imagery covering all active agriculture areas in each province, completing satellite imagery analysis first for key early-harvesting provinces, then for all the significant opium-producing provinces, and most recently for all provinces.

The UNODC’s approach of sampling the main opium-producing provinces and targeting key areas in other areas made some sense in earlier years when satellite imagery was relatively scarce and very expensive. But the enormous increase in the volume of satellite imagery available—the number of earth observation satellites increased fivefold between 2008 and 2021, with further increases since then—along with the many-orders-of-magnitude reductions in its cost obviate the need to work with limited samples. (The UNODC sampled just 17 percent of arable land in the half of Afghanistan’s provinces where it used the sample approach in 2023.) It has become not only possible but also cost effective to analyze satellite imagery for all agricultural land, and poppy fields can be surveyed multiple times during planting, cultivation, and harvesting. Opium poppy’s distinctive characteristics and the tools developed by Alcis over a number of years facilitate the complete-coverage approach.

Complete coverage becomes all the more essential in the face of major policy changes such as the Taliban ban with very large effects on the opium area. The difference between the two approaches was less consequential in a more stable policy environment characterized by smaller changes in the area of poppy cultivation. For example, the difference in the estimated total poppy area was modest in 2022: 219,744 hectares by Alcis based on its full-coverage approach, versus 233,000 hectares according to the UNODC—only a 6 percent gap. This is well within the 95-percent confidence interval characterized by the UNODC for its national estimate. But the drastic changes brought about by the Taliban’s opium ban meant that the sampling approach became misleading in the face of the concentration of remaining poppy cultivation in a few more remote areas of the major opium-producing provinces. It became critically important to capture remote areas with significant residual poppy cultivation, such as those in Nangarhar, Kandahar, and Uruzgan—not to speak of Badakhshan, where the harvest expanded. 

Alcis’s satellite imagery findings for these and other areas of remaining poppy cultivation are reinforced by on-the-ground reporting of resistance against the opium ban in southern Nangarhar province and negligible enforcement of the ban in Badakhshan. Therefore, the conclusion is inescapable that poppy cultivation for the 2023 harvest was substantial—much much closer to 31,000 hectares than 11,000 hectares.

One reason why this is important is to provide an accurate baseline from which to assess the 2024 opium harvest. If poppy cultivation next year ends up in the neighborhood of 30,000 hectares or even somewhat more, that would be a tremendous achievement from the perspective of sustained implementation of the opium ban—even more unprecedented than the effective Taliban first-year bans in 2000-2001 and 2022-2023. Past experience in Afghanistan shows that it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a national or provincial opium ban after the first year, as parts of the rural population suffer worsening deprivation, exhaust coping mechanisms, and engage in more resistance. But relying on 11,000 hectares as the baseline would be highly misleading if UNODC’s estimate becomes more accurate next year and, for example, shows cultivation of around 30,000 hectares, falsely implying a spurious large expansion of poppy cultivation.

What Does the Sizable Residual Poppy Harvest in 2023 Mean?

The higher 31,000 hectares estimate of 2023 poppy cultivation after the Taliban ban does not detract from its overall effectiveness and its demonstration of Taliban capabilities to enforce what its leadership sees as a core priority. No other Afghan government, nor any other country, has demonstrated such effectiveness in the near elimination of major drug crop cultivation within a year. However, the significant remaining harvest does help explain how the ban was implemented and the obstacles and resistance encountered, as well as the strength and reach of the Taliban across the country. 

As David Mansfield argues cogently, Taliban enforcement of the opium ban ramped up over time after it was announced in April 2022, and as a result of pressure and threats, most farmers decided not to cultivate poppy in the fall 2022 planting season. Eradication threats, self-eradication, and modest government eradication actions further reduced cultivation in several areas where planting occurred, though eradication made up only a small proportion of the reduction in the poppy cultivation area.

The main exceptions where substantial poppy cultivation remained, according to Alcis’s data, are Badakhshan province as a whole (15,388 hectares in 2023) and remote areas in Kandahar (5,685 hectares), Daykundi (2,165 hectares), Uruzgan (1,878 hectares), and Baghlan (1,474 hectares)—together these five provinces accounted for 86 percent of the total remaining poppy cultivation.

These provinces with clusters of sizable opium poppy cultivation, as well as others with smaller but still significant harvests, are diverse in terms of ethnicity, geographic location, and linkages to the core Taliban leadership based in Kandahar. Except in Badakhshan, however, the residual opium harvest tends to be located in more remote areas (or in the case of Daikundi in a very remote province). Another common feature is that these areas (as well as others that have significant residual poppy cultivation) are characterized by small landholdings, high person-land ratios, limited or no inventories of opium, worse poverty, climatic factors and water scarcity limiting other agricultural options, and few opportunities for non-farm economic activities. It is not surprising that resistance against the ban has been greater in these areas, though there has been variation in the severity of enforcement—for example, as between Badakhshan and more remote parts of Nangarhar, as Mansfield documents. 

However, there are some cross-province differences that cannot easily be explained by these factors and may reflect more idiosyncratic aspects such as who is in charge of and the government leadership team in particular provinces, and their wider networks and connections. For example, enforcement of the opium ban has been much more complete in Herat and northwestern provinces (Badghis, Faryab, Jowzjan, and including the northern province of Balkh) than it has been in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar, Zabul, and Uruzgan. In contrast, neighboring Helmand, consistently by far the country’s largest opium-producing province, saw poppy cultivation virtually wiped out. And there was a much greater reduction in the poppy area in Ghazni than in Kapisa.

Implications for the Future

The Taliban’s poppy ban, while arguably reflecting their core policy priorities and demonstrating their grip on power and enforcement capabilities, was a serious mistake from an economic perspective. The loss of more than $1 billion in rural incomes and livelihoods in an already weak economy has been devastating to poorer households without adequate land, opium inventories, and nonfarm sources of income. These adverse consequences continue to play out and are likely to worsen as opium inventories of mid-level farmers, other household assets, and coping strategies get exhausted. Continuing strong implementation of the ban during the current fall planting season will compound the mistake and plunge even more Afghans below the subsistence level—at a time when other shocks are hitting the economy such as the sharp decline in humanitarian aid this year and the  forced deportation and return of many Afghans from Pakistan—reportedly more than 400,000 so far.

On the political front, despite some tensions, and noncompliance with the ban in Badakhshan and resistance in remote parts of some other provinces, any adverse political fallout from the ban’s first year seems to have been manageable. This may not hold true if the ban is vigorously pursued for a second year in a row. Nevertheless, the Taliban regime appears to be set on a course to continue to implement the poppy ban, and it appears to be taking stronger actions against opium trading and processing. The promulgation of and publicity around a new anti-drugs law on Oct. 1, and the appointment of a Kandahari Taliban figure as governor of Badakhshan province in September, are among the early signs pointing in this direction. And the most recent sharp price increases for opium strongly suggest that the market is “pricing in” continuation of the opium ban.

We won’t know definitively from satellite imagery how much poppy has been planted in the key early-harvesting provinces for a number of months, though fieldwork and press reports as well as Taliban announcements can provide some clues as to how strongly the opium ban is being enforced. Helmand province as well as other southern and southwestern provinces will provide a relatively early indication of actual planting and whether the ban is being fully maintained or is eroding. If past experience is a guide, any substantial eradication of poppy fields there or elsewhere would likely occur relatively early in the season rather than near the harvest when resistance would be greater and likely more violent.  

There would appear to be three broad scenarios for how things play out in the coming year. The first scenario is continuing “success.” In this scenario, the ban is implemented effectively for a second year and poppy cultivation does not increase at all or very much from the 2023 harvest of 31,000 hectares; perhaps there is even some further decline. This scenario would likely face increasing resistance, will be very costly for the Afghan people and economy, and may be politically damaging to the Taliban, but they are able to absorb these costs and slog through with a completely unprecedented effective implementation of the national ban for a second year. Under this scenario, the crackdown on opium processing and trading also would likely be ramped up, as has already begun to happen. But even if this scenario materializes, the problems, resistance, and pressures on the Taliban would further compound in the third year. This is what happened notably with the provincial-level poppy cultivation ban in Nangarhar during the 2000s under the Islamic Republic, which held for a couple of years but increasingly frayed, with serious political costs for the government, until the poppy harvest returned to high levels.

A second scenario is outright failure. In this scenario, despite Taliban enforcement efforts, the resistance snowballs and spreads; the area planted to poppy ends up being a multiple of that in 2023 (though unlikely to return right away to its normal level of more than 200,000 hectares); efforts to crack down on trading and processing probably also achieve limited success; and the limits to Taliban control in the drugs sphere become widely apparent to the population. Though economically this scenario would be better for opium-farming households and others involved in the sector, they would face considerable uncertainty, for example, over whether their fields would be eradicated (or not). The political impact of such an outright failure would be a wild card and impossible to predict, but it could be severe and could undermine the Taliban in a way that their other policies (such as restrictions against female education and women working), as well as international pressure and sanctions, have not.

A third scenario, probably better economically for Afghans and politically for the Taliban in the short run, is some kind of de facto relaxation. In this scenario, the ban, while not formally rescinded, is implemented less vigorously, poppy increases in those parts of the country where it remained entrenched in 2023, and it returns at least in modest amounts in some of the core areas where it was wiped out. This scenario would partly reverse the economic damage from the ban and limit any political damage to the Taliban. However, this would not be a sustainable equilibrium—even if the poppy harvest is much smaller in 2024 than in the years prior to 2023, it would inevitably creep up over time and again become normalized within a couple of years.    

How should the U.S. and other countries respond to the current ban and future developments? As noted by Mansfield and others, there are no good options, and the degree of external influence on Taliban policies in general, especially in their self-perceived core policy areas like drugs, should not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, this may well be an important area for the Taliban’s future and that of Afghanistan. Here are some suggestions:

• Monitor the situation closely and ensure there is timely full-coverage satellite imagery analysis as poppy planting, cultivation, and eventually harvesting proceed in different parts of the country, complemented by selective fieldwork and review of Taliban announcements and public actions.

• Ensure that the most important (actual and potential) opium-producing provinces are surveyed multiple times during their seasons, which will provide insights not only into the status of the crop but also into what is happening with eradication, farmers’ abandoning poppy fields, etc.

• Circulate widely and make publicly available the findings of satellite imagery and other analysis as and when it can be conducted province-by-province, rather than waiting for the complete national picture when the last province has harvested. Policymakers and analysts need timely information.

• Temper praise of the Taliban ban: Effective implementation of an inappropriate, unsustainable policy is not necessarily better than a different or no policy, and likely will go against the longer-term objective of lasting elimination of drug crop production in Afghanistan over time.

• Recognize that the key to success against opium and other illicit drugs is a robustly growing economy and broad-based rural development, which will generate jobs and livelihoods to replace incomes from drug production—even while acknowledging that the prospects for this are dim at present.

• Don’t advocate for, let alone fund, standalone alternative livelihood projects—experience in Afghanistan and elsewhere demonstrates that they don’t work and are not sustainable. Instead, shift the composition of aid away from humanitarian toward basic rural and other development.

• Do support treatment and harm reduction for problem drug users—this is an area where there is great need in Afghanistan, and more resources and better policies and practices will be helpful.

• Help ensure that inward remittances from other countries move smoothly and efficiently. While many Afghans are being forcibly deported from Pakistan, others are going to countries farther afield, and their earnings and remittances back to Afghanistan will be crucial for many households’ survival.

• This would entail international actions to facilitate payments and banking transactions such as arranging third-party anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) monitoring to provide greater confidence for foreign financial institutions, as well as expanding innovative swap arrangements, use of digital currency, and the like. 

• Related, more generally encourage sensible broader economic policies on the part of the Taliban to mitigate the damage from the ban and other shocks—such as preventing exchange rate appreciation and disinflation, avoiding over-taxation of the private sector, more budget for development, etc.