Gul Haidar smiled as he sifted some seeds through his fingers, happy he had planted the one crop that should ensure his family's welfare next year -- opium poppies.
In pencil-thin, spiraling furrows dug with a homemade plow pulled by oxen, Haidar has sown the tiny, pale specks that will yield flowers in four months. When the petals fall, buyers will come for the seed pods and its opium resin.
The Pashto-speaking farmer expects to triple what he had made from the winter wheat he had planted the last three seasons.
With the Taliban no longer around to enforce a three-year ban on poppy-growing, hundreds of farmers near the eastern city of Jalalabad -- their appetite for profit sharpened by years of drought and hardship -- have resumed planting what they call "narcotic."
"We don't have much water, so with narcotic we make more money to offset the problem of the drought," Haidar said. "If you water twice a year, narcotic will do very well, but with wheat, you have to water nine times."
Miles of flat fields surround Jalalabad, with barren desert mountains visible in the distance. Hundreds of kilometers of irrigation canals funnel runoff from mountain springs and creeks onto the fields, but after three years without rain, water is precious.
The 75-year-old Haidar, who lives in a mud house, has rented his 304 hectares from a wealthy Afghan for the past half-century.
Before the Taliban ban, he almost exclusively grew poppies. During the past three years, he switched to wheat rather than risk imprisonment. But Haidar had stashed a bag of poppy seeds -- and brought them out when the Taliban fled Jalalabad this month, in time for planting season.
Now he has sown 100 hectares of poppies, which he said will yield 290kg of opium.
"It will be just enough to live," Haidar said. "I have a family of 10, so I work just to live, eat and for clothes."
Farmers produced 3,611 tonnes from the 1999 planting. But after a ruthless Taliban crackdown, last year's crop dropped to 204 tonnes, the agency said in July.
Most of the opium is exported and is rarely used locally.
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