Find an option for Afghan poppies

We are nearing the end of the season for the big ornamental poppies that flower all over South Oxfordshire, England, the area I used to represent in parliament. The petals have fallen to the ground, pink and purple and red.

But I expect the seed-pods are still standing tall. If you take a sharp knife to one of those seed-pods, and make a careful diagonal incision, you will see a white latex ooze out. What is that gunk?

That is opium, my friend; and the reason there are so many giant poppies all over that part of England is that the seeds have been blown in the wind or carried in the guts of birds. They have come from the farms. We actually grow opium there, and we grow it officially.

At direct government urgings, there are large tracts of land that are given over to the cultivation of the Palaver somniferum, for the very good reason that the opium is essential for the National Health Service.

When we die of cancer, or when we are carried off in any other mortal agony, our final miseries are invariably palliated by opiates, in the form of morphine or diamorphine.

Given this reality, and given the desperate shortage of analgesic drugs that has occasionally hit the health service, opium has entered the repertoire of UK cash crops.

So how would you feel, if you were sitting back on your terrace in Oxfordshire, and looking out at the poppies waving in the fields, and you heard the thugga-thugga-thugga of Apache helicopters?

Suppose these helicopters were to disgorge hundreds of dark-glass-wearing US troops, who were to advance with flame-throwers and defoliants through the fields, destroying all the vegetation they could see. I put it to you that you would be exceedingly hacked off if you were a farmer.

You would be most unlikely to sense the slightest friendliness towards those Americans or to the troops of any other country involved in the destruction. And yet that is of course the policy to which Britons are at least notionally committed in Afghanistan.

There are several respects in which the Afghan war has not yet been successful, in the past eight years. But there is one sector of the Afghan economy that has positively boomed since 2001, and that is poppy production.

Before the Western forces kicked out the Taliban, the crop was deemed un-Islamic, and production fell virtually to zero.

Since the unleashing of the 'war on terror', combined with the 'war on drugs', the figures have been astonishing. Only 15 per cent of Afghanistan is arable, and yet more of that land is now under poppy than ever before.

The illegal opium trade now accounts for about 52 per cent of the Afghan economy, about $3 billion (Dh11 billion) a year in revenues, and about 90 per cent of the world supply of heroin.
With that kind of money at stake, it is no wonder that the Hamid Karzai government is said to have become hopelessly corrupt. No one has a real interest in stamping it out. The politicians are on the take.

The Taliban use drugs money to finance their operations. American, British and other Nato forces have come to realise that eradication programmes risk deepening local poverty and losing the very 'hearts and minds' they are there to win.

With the Taliban resurgent, and with British casualties mounting, and with more illegal opium being grown than ever before, it is time to look again at one obvious solution.

Surely the West should be pursuing the argument first proposed three years ago by the Senlis council: to see if it can work with Afghan villages and farmers to develop a legitimate medical market for their crops.

To put it at its bluntest: why is the UK paying its farmers to grow poppies in Oxfordshire, and paying its soldiers to destroy them in Afghanistan? Be in no doubt that what British troops are doing in Helmand is heroic, and it is very far from futile.

The West has utterly failed to stamp out the opium crop in Afghanistan - quite the reverse. Let us help the Afghans to obtain what legal value they can from their poppies.

No one should pretend that this solution is easy, or that it is complete. As long as heroin is illegal in most jurisdictions (for the foreseeable future, that is), the price of illegal opium will probably be higher than the legal crop, and the drugs barons will not be entirely undermined.

But the West should at least try an option that offers the world cheaper pain relief, and the Afghans a viable legal alternative for their harvest. Nothing else seems to be working.

From Homer to Flanders Fields, poppies have symbolised the sacrifice of soldiers. The tragedy is that the illegal production of this flower is now funding the killing of British troops. Britain needs a better use for it.