FRANCAISMission d’aide au développement des économies rurales - Comments
4) The institutional learning
-In Afghanistan, certain regions produce opium. In such conditions, a free distribution of food can ruin local peasants or encourage them to favour the much more lucrative poppy agriculture. To avoid this problem, MADERA proposed loans to the producers who, from lack of capital, usually turned to drug dealers and reimbursed their debts with the next harvest of opium. The organisation also refused to join in on a UNDCP (United Nations Drugs Control Programme) project. In Jean-Pierre Turpin’s book, Jean-François Cautain, the director of MADERA between 1994 and 1999, explains: “to condition aid with the non-production of opium brings a possibility of blackmail. We don’t want to follow that kind of logic”.
