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Since 1997 he has been undertaking fieldwork in rural Afghanistan that has played a pioneering role in understanding the role of opium poppy in rural livelihoods and the dynamics of the farmgate trade in opium.
- The Taliban’s Highly Successful Opium Ban
- Immediate Economic Damage
- Delayed and Longer-Term Impacts
- What Happens Next?
- International Response?
Satellite imagery analyzed by Alcis and associated research by David Mansfield, an independent researcher who has conducted extensive fieldwork and analysis on Afghanistan’s opium sector and rural economy for more than a quarter-century, show that the Taliban opium ban, announced in April 2022, has been remarkably successful in sharply reducing opi...
The economic shock from the opium ban is enormous: Not including adverse effects on downstream processing, trade, transport and exports, Afghanistan’s farm-level rural economy has lost more than $1 billion per year worth of economic activity as calculated by Mansfield, including as much as hundreds of millions of dollars that had accrued to poorer ...
Additional damage from the opium ban will materialize with a delay, over the coming months and years. An important buffer for better-off rural households is the inventories of opium they have built up from the 2022 bumper crop. Landowning households able to hold on to their opium inventories have benefited from capital gains as the price rose, and ...
The big question now is whether or not the poppy ban will be maintained for a second year. Historically, there have been examples of successful opium bans in Afghanistan, both nationally (2000-2001) and regionally (Nangarhar province for a number of years, significant reductions in Helmand on two occasions). But maintaining these bans has invariabl...
There will probably be a counter narcotics-driven, knee-jerk response that the effectively implemented Taliban opium ban is a good thing. However, history amply demonstrates that banning opium in Afghanistan by itself is not sustainable, nor does it address the drug problem in Europe and elsewhere. And it won’t stop rampant drug use within Afghanis...
A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan. David Mansfield is an independent consultant widely regarded as the pre-eminent expert on rural livelihoods and opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and author of 'A State Built on Sand'.
Enduring reductions in cultivation could lead to a growing economic crisis, political instability, and an outflow of migrants from rural Afghanistan to Europe. Lead researcher David Mansfield said “The scale of the reduction is unprecedented”.
Jun 6, 2023 · David Mansfield, a leading expert on Afghanistan's drugs trade, is working with Alcis - a UK firm which specialises in satellite analysis.
In this major new book Mansfield outlines why and how Afghanistan has become the supplier of 90 per cent of the world’s heroin and what impact drug control and opium bans have had on the politics and economy of this devastated country.
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Mansfield's book examines why drug control - particularly opium bans - have been imposed in Afghanistan; he documents the actors involved; and he scrutinizes how prohibition served divergent...
