While many criticize the American government’s support globally for Monsanto’s products __ e.g. their genetically modified Roundup Ready crops like soybeans and corn __ and the promotion of large-scale farming based on monoculture and extensive use of pesticides and other chemicals, concurrently there is another whole category of agricultural enterprise underway. It’s a U.S. sponsored initiative that has markedly boosted the economy of Afghanistan, and has not gotten near the attention it deserves.
This is the enormously profitable cultivation of poppies and the skyrocketing production of opium and heroin.
What a success story!
The American military presence in Afghanistan has been a phenomenal boon to poppy farming. Though under the Taliban, poppy production had been all but completely shut down, it has substantially increased for the third year in a row. The 2013 poppy crop jumped 36% from the previous year. Predictions for next year are more optimistic.
This means that Afghanistan by a huge margin is the global leader, providing up to 90% of the raw opium for the entire world’s heroin trade.
This is so brilliant!
Not only does this help out Afghanistan but it’s a unique win-win strategy for creating jobs and fostering economic growth right here at home: Promote heroin production, then hire people to fight the War On Drugs.
And what a terrific shot in the arm for underemployed morticians and gravediggers, who get to take care of all of the victims of drug overdoses.
Is this ingenious or what?!
It seems to me that this sort of “closed loop” approach could be applied to other areas.
For example, to help our idle construction industry, we could bomb other countries into smoking piles of rubble, then using tax payer money, hire corporations with expertise in infrastructure construction and repair to rebuild everything we destroyed.
Oh . . . we’re already doing that.
