One of the positives from rising food prices
Thursday, April 24, 2008
by Geoff Riley
The Financial Times reports that
“Afghanistan’s opium crop is forecast to shrink by as much as half this year after 2007’s record harvest, counter-narcotics officials in Kabul said, as evidence emerges that some poppy farmers are switching to legal crops because of rising food prices.........Anecdotally, a lot of farmers have calculated that, with wheat prices being what they are, they can make money out of planting wheat.”
The fall in output is also the result of climatic conditions and also the lagged effects of the bumper opium crop last year which in turn led to a sharp fall in prices
The rest of the article is here
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Comments
Brings a wry smile to my face but it’s a sad state of affairs when we require a global food crisis to cut the supply of drugs. However, this “blessing in disguise” is unlikely to last in the long term. If the opium crop does indeed half, then as supply shrinks prices for heroin will also increase. The year after that we’ll probably see more opium crops being planted in response to higher profitability. Whether the cobweb model diverges or converges depends on how the players along the drug chain chooses to respond.
Posted by on 04/27 at 01:42 PM
