By Mohammad Yunus Yawar , Sayed Hassib and Ahmad Masih Noori
BABA YUSUF, Afghanistan, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Carpets still hang on the walls of Mohammad Dawood’s home in a northern Afghanistan village, and ornate mirrors still catch the light, relics of the years when a single poppy harvest could carry his family through the year.
But the 28-year-old says he now spends his days bent over cotton and wheat in fields that barely provide a living.
“We were doing well,” he said in an interview in his home in the
Baba Yusuf village of Balkh province. “Now, my children are malnourished.”
In years gone by, Afghanistan's poppy fields produced about 80% of the world's opium, used in the manufacture of morphine as well as in illegal drugs like heroin.
Four years ago, the Taliban began enforcing an opium ban so strict that poppy all but vanished from Afghanistan’s fields. But now their Supreme Leader’s edict is beginning to fray, worn down by a practical problem: legal crops no longer pay and many Afghan farmers say they are struggling to feed their children.
Some are turning back to poppy, and cultivation rose sharply this year, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported on Thursday, in a reversal that could reshape heroin markets as far away as Europe.
Many farmers "don't have any other choice than to go back to poppy cultivation," Polleak Ok Serei, UNODC's country representative for Afghanistan, told Reuters.
Dawood said he is still complying with the ban. But on a bad day, he makes one-fortieth of what he used to make with poppy, he said.
Not all of his neighbours are complying. Balkh, which UNODC found to be poppy-free last year, is growing poppy again this year, the agency reported, although few farmers would dare admit it amid continued Taliban scrutiny.
Cultivation across Afghanistan more than quadrupled this year from 2025 to an estimated 43,300 hectares, according to satellite imagery analysed by the UN. Farmers now hide the poppies from Taliban officials inside cereal fields and behind mud walls.
Cultivation is still only at about a quarter of the 177,000 hectares planted in 2021, the year before the ban was imposed by the Taliban.
But opium sales in Afghanistan generated an estimated $525 million this year, the highest figure since 2018 with the exception of 2022 when the Taliban's ban made prices skyrocket, UNODC said.
The Taliban rejected the report's findings, saying actual cultivation was about half the UN estimate and that poppy eradication efforts continued.
The Taliban-run Interior Ministry did not respond to a request for comment by Reuters.
FALLING FARM INCOMES AND CHILD MALNUTRITION
In the country’s farmlands, aid groups say, the economic pressure has become severe.
The toll is increasingly visible among children. UN agencies warned this month that 10 out of Afghanistan's 34 provinces had critical levels of child malnutrition this year and the number could climb to 14 in 2027.
Despite better harvests, they said, high costs and low crop prices are squeezing poorer farmers and limiting families’ access to food.
Foreign aid cuts and the Taliban’s international isolation over their crackdown on women’s rights have also played a significant role, diplomats say. But at the Alam Khil health center in Balkh, doctors and patients primarily blamed declining farm income for the growing number of severe malnutrition cases the clinic treats.
Outside the clinic, Tahira, whose husband grows cotton, waited for treatment with one of her four children, 7-month-old Benjamin, who was suffering from fever and diarrhea.
“The doctors say he is malnourished,” she said, adding that the family was barely making ends meet. “Our lives used to be good.”
The clinic is surrounded by cotton fields, where white tufts still waited to be picked.
Salima Mohammadi, a nutrition nurse at the clinic, said many families had struggled to find another crop that could support them since poppy disappeared from local fields.
“People own farmland,” she said, “but agricultural yields decrease year after year.”
INTERNATIONAL FALLOUT
What happens in fields like these will have repercussions far beyond Afghanistan. A full return to poppy production would have major implications for global drug markets, analysts say.
"Combine this with the active trafficking networks within the country and the resilient smuggling operations to get the opiates out of the country, and you have a very bleak prediction for the future," said Paddy Ginn, an analyst with the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Until the ban, the crop from the country's poppy fields fuelled health crises across the world, corruption along the trafficking routes that carried it to Europe as heroin and deadly clashes between counter-narcotics forces and smugglers.
After 2022, pre-ban stockpiles initially cushioned the global shortage and blunted price spikes in Europe, giving Afghan farmers less reason to openly defy the ban. But UNODC warned on Thursday that those stockpiles may be running out, strengthening the incentive to plant again.
The Taliban regard the ban as one of their signature achievements and have cited it in their efforts to win international legitimacy.
But Taliban officials themselves have publicly acknowledged the challenges in recent years. Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s foreign minister, said at a meeting this month that “support for alternative livelihoods for farmers” was crucial to “ensure the continuation and strengthening of this campaign.”
But UNODC's Ok Serei said there "was not enough support for alternative livelihoods" either from the Taliban government or the international community.
DROUGHT, WHEAT AND COTTON PRICES SQUEEZE FARMERS
The Taliban’s first ban, in 2000, collapsed about a year later, when US-led forces drove them from power after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The current ban has lasted far longer, but the farmers expected to uphold it face harsher conditions than a generation ago. Recurring droughts have shrunk rivers and canals.
Drought has choked off much of the fresh water in the fields around Baba Yusuf, said Gul Nazar, a 56-year-old landowner, leaving well water so briny that it damages crops.
Legal alternatives have faltered, too. Wheat barely covers its costs, farmers in Baba Yusuf said. Cotton prices have fallen by about two-thirds amid a sudden nationwide glut, Gul Nazar said, a slump he partly blames on Pakistan’s closure of the border late last year, which cut off a key buyer.
Higher-value crops promoted by aid groups, such as orchard fruit or nuts, take years to establish and depend on reliable water and open export routes.
More than four in five households in Balkh and two nearby provinces reported in a UNODC survey last year that they had replaced none or only part of their lost poppy income.
Gul Nazar said he would not grow poppy again if his family’s living conditions improved. But if they grew worse, he said, he could not promise the same.
“When a person becomes hungry,” he said, “they will do anything.”
(Writing by Rick Noack; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
