Illicit drug production: Madrassa students harvest poppy on holidays

Children are routinely engaged by Afghan farmers for poppy cultivation. PHOTO: REUTERS/FILE

QUETTA - Afghanistan, as of March 2010, is the largest illicit opium producer of the world, ahead of Burma, and Pakistan has a clinical role to play in this statistic. In 2007, Afghanistan produced an extraordinary 8,200 tonnes of opium (34% more than in 2006), becoming practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug (93% of the global opiates market), according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007. Being one of the world’s largest opium and heroin producer, the labour demand needed to cater to this extensive poppy harvesting and cultivation is met in an invariably peculiar way. Hundreds of madrassa students from Chaman and adjoining tribal regions of Balochistan are engaged by Afghan farmers for poppy cultivation in Afghanistan’s two major heroin-producing provinces of Helmand and Kandahar for the past three months. These Pakistani madrassa students rush to the Afghan provinces with strongholds of the Taliban, on lucrative money-making projects as soon as their madrassas are closed in the first week of June for the three-month summer holidays. Full Story>>

Illicit drug production: Madrassa students harvest poppy on holidays http://tribune.com.pk/story/224821/illicit-drug-production-balochistan-madrassa-students-harvest-poppy-on-holidays/