Making Sense of the Data

The most accurate available data, compiled by the geospatial technology firm Alcis, shows that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan fell sharply in 2024, contrary to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) estimate that it increased. This clearly demonstrates that the Taliban’s opium ban has intensified, not weakened, in its second year of implementation, highlighting the importance of informing analysis and policy debates with high-quality, timely data.

As with other core Taliban ideological priorities, such as severe and worsening gender restrictions, international influence over their drugs policies is, at best, limited. However, at the very least, dialogue on the opium ban and related issues should be based on accurate and timely information. Additionally, the international community should avoid giving the Taliban false hope that large amounts of aid will be forthcoming in response to the ban or that, even if it were, such aid would solve the opium problem — let alone quickly. As shown by experience in other countries and in Afghanistan, the solution lies in rural development and robust economic growth over an extended period, during which the country and its economy can gradually reduce their dependence on illegal drug crop production.

Sharply Contrasting Trends at the National Level

The outcome of the second year of the Taliban’s opium ban is now clear. Data compiled through sophisticated satellite imagery analysis by Alcis show a further major reduction in the area of poppy cultivated in Afghanistan in 2024 — from an estimated 22,693 hectares in 2023 to 7,382 hectares, a drop of 67 percent. This follows the enormous nearly 90 percent reduction in 2023 and contrasts with UNODC’s estimate that cultivation increased by 19 percent in 2024, from 10,800 hectares in 2023 to 12,800 hectares. As a result, whereas UNODC’s figure for 2023 was far lower than that of Alcis — well under half — its 2024 estimate is 35 percent higher. These large differences have significant implications for assessing the effectiveness of the Taliban’s ban.

The author’s 2023 publication compared the methodologies for estimating the area of opium poppy cultivation used by UNODC and Alcis, firmly concluding that the latter’s approach yields more accurate data. Looking toward 2024, it stated: “relying on 11,000 hectares as the baseline would be highly misleading if UNODC’s estimate becomes more accurate next year … falsely implying a spurious large expansion of poppy cultivation.”

Alcis’ results are generated by machine learning models run against an extremely large stack of satellite images repeatedly collected across all agricultural land in Afghanistan. This approach is more accurate than UNODC’s long-standing methodology, which relies on a few satellite images covering only a fraction of the agricultural area — just 17 percent of arable land in 2023 and 18 percent in 2024. UNODC uses two approaches for different provinces: (1) sampling for provinces with a significant percentage of their agricultural land expected to be cultivated with poppy, as the accuracy of sampling improves when this percentage is higher; and (2) targeting for provinces with low levels of opium poppy cultivation, where satellite imagery collection locations are guided by field reports on where poppy is being cultivated.

With such low levels of poppy cultivation and its much smaller share of total agricultural land over the last two years, the sampling approach has become even less accurate. As a result, the vast majority of provinces should have been targeted rather than sampled. However, in 2023, 16 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces were sampled, and in 2024, 17 provinces were sampled, despite the near-certainty that cultivation would be low everywhere except in Badakhshan.

Beyond the major differences in methodology, UNODC never revised its figure for 2023, even in light of the very different estimate by Alcis and advancements in satellite imagery and analytical tools. This resulted in UNODC showing a spurious increase in poppy cultivation in 2024. Alcis, on the other hand, revised its data for poppy cultivation in 2023 and earlier years, reducing the 2023 figure from 31,000 hectares to 22,693 hectares. While this represents an improvement in data accuracy, it does not alter the trends. Moreover, the revised data are fully consistent with the methodology used to derive the 2024 estimate, ensuring the two years can be accurately compared.

Even Greater Differences at the Provincial Level

Badakhshan province, which became Afghanistan’s largest cultivator of opium poppy after the Taliban ban was enforced, provides an even more striking example of how less accurate data can be misleading and cause problems for analysis. In 2022, Alcis and UNODC’s estimates for Badakhshan — 4,913 hectares and 4,305 hectares, respectively—were reasonably close, and trends in earlier years were broadly similar. In 2023, however, they diverged markedly, with UNODC’s estimate indicating a sharp decline to 1,573 hectares (a 63 percent drop), but Alcis’ estimate showing a 38 percent increase to 6,795 hectares.

In 2024, the contrast is even sharper: Alcis figures show provincial poppy cultivation falling (from 6,795 hectares in 2023 to 3,636 hectares in 2024, i.e., a 46 percent drop). Thus, the serious opposition the Taliban faced in Badakhshan did not prevent the observed reduction in 2024. This decline primarily reflected farmers’ greater caution toward planting poppy, rather than eradication efforts, which achieved only very limited success.

UNODC’s estimates, in contrast, indicate that poppy cultivation in Badakhshan surged by 371 percent (from 1,573 hectares in 2023 to 7,408 hectares in 2024). It is highly implausible that cultivation was so low in 2023, let alone that it saw such an enormous rise in 2024. This example strikingly demonstrates the distortions that arise when earlier years’ data are not revised in light of better information. Despite the relative weakness of Talban enforcement in Badakhshan compared to other provinces, there is no indication that it became much laxer in 2024, let alone so weak as to allow a nearly fourfold increase in poppy cultivation.

Trends for other provinces also differ as between UNODC and Alcis estimates. Alcis found that in 2023, four provinces had poppy cultivation well in excess of 1,000 hectares each: Kandahar (5,685 hectares), Daykundi (2,165 hectares), Uruzgan (1,878 hectares) and Baghlan (1,474 hectares) — a total of 11,202 hectares or half the national total. In 2024, further demonstrating that the Taliban ban intensified, this substantial poppy cultivation was largely wiped out, with Kandahar cultivating only 777 hectares and the other provinces cultivating much less. However, the UNODC estimates show Daykundi and Baghlan as “poppy-free” (less than 100 hectares) in both 2023 and 2024. As a result, around 3,600 hectares of 2023 poppy cultivation in these two provinces was missed.

Inaccurate magnitudes and trends can lead to misinterpretation and misleading analysis, whether in media reports or when researchers and analysts use UNODC data uncritically. For example, a recent paper focuses on Badakhshan and includes useful background and qualitative insights, but it simply accepts the UNODC cultivation estimates without questioning them.

What Is Happening to Land Previously Cultivated with Poppy?

Alcis’ comprehensive satellite imagery-based data can shed light on what crops are being planted on the large area of land previously devoted to poppy — over 200,000 hectares of Afghanistan’s total cultivated agricultural land area, which ranges from 1.1 to 1.5 million hectares — following the ban.

Poppy has largely been replaced by wheat, a low-value crop that does not allow poor farmers to make ends meet, which bodes ill for the ban’s sustainability. In 2023, a 194,000-hectare increase in the estimated area cultivated with wheat was slightly larger than the 188,000-hectare reduction in the opium poppy area after the Taliban ban. In effect, the land vacated by poppy was entirely replaced with wheat.

Looking at Helmand province, by far the country’s largest opium producer prior to the Taliban ban, poppy cultivation collapsed from an estimated 129,640 hectares in 2022 to a mere 740 hectares in 2023 — a precipitous drop of 128,900 hectares. Wheat cultivation increased by 81,116 hectares — equivalent to 63 percent of the poppy decline. However, the total cultivated agricultural area fell by 45,262 hectares, and these two factors together accounted for 98 percent of the decline in poppy cultivation. So, although wheat did not replace poppy one-for-one in Helmand, wheat plus additional uncultivated land was equivalent to nearly the entire reduction in poppy cultivation.

In 2024, the estimated total national agricultural cultivated area fell significantly by nearly 20 percent, but the estimated area devoted to wheat fell by a smaller percentage (15 percent), and far less than the 67 percent drop in poppy cultivation from 2023. Thus, the share of wheat in the total rose — further underlining the unsustainability of the ban.

Wheat is a low-value crop that cannot provide sufficient food or income for land-poor farmers to survive. The only advantage that wheat, an annual crop, offers to farmers is that it is easy to shift back from wheat to poppy in the future — a prospect many of them may be expecting. There is no sign of a substantial shift toward higher-value cash crops that could replace opium on a more sustainable basis, let alone of any robust growth in the broader economy, which would provide non-agricultural employment and livelihoods.

Conclusion

Beyond the poverty and deprivation it causes, the Taliban’s continuing ban on opium, and the fact that poppy is being replaced primarily by wheat rather than other, more remunerative cash crops, means that dissatisfaction and possible political tensions will likely worsen.

As shown by independent researcher David Mansfield, larger landholding farmers can feed their families by cultivating their land with wheat and other food crops, covering remaining expenses by gradually selling off their opium inventories accumulated from bumper crops in 2022 and earlier years. Indeed, they can prosper based on the capital gains from inventories sold at much higher prices due to the ban. As these inventories get depleted, however, pressures for a return to poppy cultivation will intensify. Moreover, the Taliban’s recent, stronger efforts to crack down on the processing of opium and trade in opiates may further exacerbate discontent and associated tensions among groups extending well beyond the smaller poppy farmers.

The Taliban have exhibited unprecedented persistence and staying power in pursuing the poppy ban, except to some extent in Badakhshan — but even in that province, cultivation has fallen substantially in 2024. If the ban doesn’t fray much in 2025, which will be its third year in effect, it will bode ill for Afghanistan’s already poor and suffering rural population, lead over time to increasing dissatisfaction on the part of influential landholders and others and potentially give rise to political tensions and instability.

Early signs of poppy planting suggest that the ban may start to weaken in response to these pressures. However, even a selective, de facto relaxation could lead to a snowballing revival of widespread poppy cultivation, potentially undermining the perceived authority and effectiveness of the Taliban regime. On the other hand, if the ban is maintained more or less intact for several more years, it would demonstrate the regime’s strength but harm the economy and worsen poverty. Aid alone, even in large amounts (which are very unlikely to materialize in the current situation), will not be able to offset the economic shock of the drug ban, nor stimulate sustained robust economic growth and rural development — the sine qua non for lasting success against opium.