Tthe smell seemed unmistakable, the dried buds looked familiar, and the Taliban checkpoint guards, who had never heard of CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabis compound, were disgusted by the spicy load in Amin Karim’s truck.
“They said to me, ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Haji?'” using an honorific for an older man, as they peered through piles of hemp on their way to Kabul last October.
He tried to explain to them that there was nothing in the plants that would cause someone to sink. Instead, they were part of a new project to tackle Afghanistan’s opium industry, which supplies most of the world’s heroin and has created dire addiction problems at home.
But the CBD revolution hasn’t really caught on in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the country’s new rulers have promised a crackdown on drug production.
Karim’s position as a veteran of the resistance against the Soviet invaders, a former peace negotiator and presidential adviser, and a leading figure in the influential Hezb-i-Islami party, carried no weight with the men seeking contraband.
Convinced that they could rely on the evidence of their eyes and noses, they had no patience for his attempts to explain that the crop was made from genetically modified seeds, so that the plants did not produce any tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) , the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. .
Amin Karim and his daughter Rayhana in a small field behind their home in Kabul on July 21, where some of the genetically modified hemp plants have been harvested. Photograph: Nanna Muus Steffensen/The Guardian
“They took everything and probably burned it. We were so afraid they might catch us and jail us and say we’d been dealing narcotics,” said her daughter Rayhana Karim, who gave up a career as a London restaurateur last year to move to Afghanistan and focus on humanitarian work.
The rest of this trial crop, which should have been worth up to 6 euros per gram on European markets, is in storage. After the Taliban takeover, Afghan laboratories could no longer provide the international certificates required for export.
But the Karims and the charity they work with, Hemp Aid, have not given up, working instead on alternative certification in Pakistan for exports and persuading the Taliban to approve the new crop for production in the ‘Afghanistan.
They are convinced that in hemp the country could find a solution not only to opium, but also to the terrible malnutrition that paralyzes Afghan lives. A long-standing problem has been greatly exacerbated by the economic collapse that followed the Taliban’s takeover last August.
One strain of the plant produces CBD oil, but another, hemp fiber, can be used to make protein-rich hemp flour. By weight it provides as much protein as beef or lamb, as well as many other nutrients, and the group hopes to use it to enrich the wheat bread that is an Afghan staple.
In recent trials with a local bakery, they found that mixed with 7% wheat flour, it doesn’t affect the taste (higher levels of hemp were unpopular) but makes each piece of bread seven or eight times more nutritious.
They are to plant their first fields of hemp fiber plants in two eastern provinces next week. They hoped the crop would be less controversial than CBD plants because it doesn’t smell much and looks more like sugarcane than a narcotics field, but 400kg of imported seeds are currently stuck at airport customs .
Karim is talking to the Taliban leadership about releasing the hemp seeds and approving the production of CBD. “We have to take this slowly and do some education as our mullahs don’t know much about it [crop]”, a senior Taliban official told him.
Hemp is relatively easy to grow, store and transport and uses less water than opium, says Babur Kabiri, co-founder of Hemp Aid. This is a vital consideration in a country that is already badly affected by rising global temperatures and last year suffered the worst drought in decades.
It is also valuable, essential to any attempt to ban opium cultivation. Two decades of eradication efforts by the governments of the Afghan republic, supported by the US, only led to record crops. Despite Taliban promises to eradicate opium, fields flourished across the country this year.
Saffron, roses, and pomegranates were promoted as substitutes, but they proved difficult to harvest, store, or transport, or there was no room for new producers in well-established markets.
Last year, Afghanistan’s illegal opiate economy was worth between $1.8 billion and $2.7 billion, the United Nations estimated. Opiates earned more than all legal exports of goods and services combined and supplied eight out of 10 users worldwide. Replacing such a lucrative crop has always been a difficult challenge.
The trade enriches the middlemen, but for the desperately poor farmers who produce the opium, it is often simply the difference between going hungry or feeding their families. Although many are uncomfortable growing poppies, they believe they have few alternatives.
Karim’s political instincts made him Hizb-i-Islami’s chief negotiator in a 2014 peace deal that brought in leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fugitive warlord and former al-Qaida ally charged with frequency of war crimes, such as bombing civilian areas in Kabul, laying down their arms and rejoining the Afghan political mainstream.
He has focused some of that energy on a new policy proposal to bring the Taliban back out of political isolation, but CBD and hemp flour have become a passion since he turned a parking lot near his home into a first experimental field.
“After you take the oil, you can use the rest to make fiber, make shoes, clothes, paper, bricks, walls,” he says. “Every part of this plant is useful.”
Afghanistan has been famous for its marijuana since hippies started heading to Kabul six decades ago. Karim, who has never touched drugs, believes that Afghanistan can take advantage of this fame.
“Afghanistan is famous for this plant all over the world,” he said. “If we can set up a laboratory in Kabul, we can manufacture a multitude of products and export them worldwide under an Afghan brand.”
