Poppy for Medicine projects aim to build a village-based morphine production industry, the product of which is bought by the Afghan government for
international sale. The project proposes the creation of village shura-run
cooperative associations to manage the cultivation and manufacture process, the size of which would depend on the participating villages.
Scientific pilot projects should be put in place for the next planting system.
Village-based morphine manufacture
All villages in a project cluster would share a single small morphine production factory. The Project cluster would transform raw opium into morphine and then process the obtained morphine into medicine tablets. The table below indicates how much raw opium would be produced by a project cluster according to its size, based on a yield of 37 kg per hectare and an average farm size of 0.4 hectares.
Example 1
For example, a 15-village project with each village comprising an average of 15 farms would yield a harvest of approximately 3,330 kg of fresh opium. After drying, a process necessary to morphine extraction that means the loss of 10% of the opium’s weight, the project’s harvest would weight 2,997 kg. Thus, such a project cluster would require a factory able to process 3 tonnes of dried opium into morphine, and to convert the obtained 300 kg of morphine into tablets.
Example 2
A 10-village project with each village comprising an average of 5 farms would yield a harvest of approximately 740 kg of fresh opium. After drying, the project’s harvest would weight around 666 kg. Such a project cluster would need a relatively small factory to process 0.7 tonne of dried opium into morphine, and to convert the obtained 70 kg of morphine into tablets.
Example 3
A 25-village project with each village comprising an average of 10 farms would yield a harvest of approximately 3,700 kg of fresh opium. After drying, the project’s harvest would weight 3,330 kg. Such a project cluster would require a factory able to handle around 3.5 tonnes of dried opium, and to convert around 350 kg of morphine into tablets.
