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Afghanistan : The curse of ‘opium brides’ |
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As Afghanistan battles to check growing poppy production, there thrives a disturbing trend behind the scene, where daughters of poppy producers pay the price for the unpaid loans owned to drug traffickers. Termed as “opium brides”, the daughters of poor poppy framers are often given to drug traffickers if their fathers are unable to pay the loan taken for growing the illicit crop because of the official loan. In a report in its upcoming issue, Newsweek takes the case of an illiterate poor farmer in Laghman Province who borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker promising to pay back with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. But officials destroyed his two-and-a-half acre poppy farm. Unable to pay, he fled but was located by the trafficker and then village elders decided that he should give his 10-year-old daughter to the 45-year-old trafficker to settle the debt. Local farmers were quoted as saying that a man can get killed on failing to repay a loan. No one, the magazine says, knows how many debt weddings take place in Afghanistan, where 93 per cent of the world’s heroin originates. But Afghans say the number of local brides keeps rising as poppy eradication efforts push more farmers into default. The local farmers are quoted by Newsweek as saying more than one debtor has been bound hand and foot, then locked into a small windowless room with a smoldering fire, slowly choking to death. An estimated 500,000 Afghan families support themselves by raising poppies according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Last year, those growers received an estimated $one billion for their crops, about $2,000 per household. With at least six members in the average family, opium growers’ per capita income is roughly $300. The real profits go to the traffickers, their Taliban allies and the crooked officials who help them operate.
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