Kandahar

Kandahar
ActiveCannabis last recorded here in 2019
The Arghandab valley, Kandahar Province
⛶
Hierarchy
Growing Region	Southern Afghanistan
Geography
Country	Afghanistan
Province/State	Kandahar Province
Coordinates	31.61, 65.71
Landscape
Area	15,900 km²
Terrain	Within Kandahar Province; its outer edge leaves out ground above 4,000 m, bare or sparse ground, snow and ice, and open water
Growing history
Dated accessions	2019
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	3
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Kandahar is a landrace cannabis growing area in southern Afghanistan, drawn on Kandahar Province, the province round the city of Kandahar. The cannabis surveys carried out by the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found cannabis grown in the province in each of their four years, 2009 to 2012.^{: 11: 13: 13: 12} The first survey reported "sizable amounts of cannabis cultivation" in all four southern provinces it covered, Kandahar among them, but none of the four gives an area for any one province.^{: 11, 20: 9} The survey's photographs show fields in the districts of Dand, Zhari, Arghandab and Maywand.^: 57–59

Cultivation in the surveys

The 2009 survey covered the twenty provinces where cannabis had been seen or reported before and counted only cannabis grown on fields; kitchen gardens, plants along compound walls and wild cannabis were left out.^: 11 In Kandahar the 2009 survey's village interviews were left out of the area estimate: checked against the farmland in the surveyed villages, the cannabis area and the arable land the villages reported were "grossly over-estimated", so the estimate for the province rested on the satellite images alone.^: 52 Surveyors could not check the satellite images on the ground in Hilmand, Uruzgan and Zabul, and found it difficult in most of the south. On 14 December 2009 an aircraft fitted with a high-resolution camera flew over selected areas of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul instead, and the report prints an oblique aerial photograph and a satellite image of a cannabis field in Kandahar Province.^{: 49, 51}

The province was again growing cannabis in 2010, when the survey's photographs of fields in flower came from central Kandahar.^{: 13, 17, 20} The 2011 and 2012 reports were retitled surveys of commercial cannabis and counted only fields where cannabis was grown as a single crop. Kandahar was among the provinces whose estimate came from a random sample of satellite images in both years, and the 2012 report photographs cannabis in flower in Panjway district.^{: 11, 13, 44: 12, 15, 27} Helicopter flights over Kandahar and six other provinces in 2012 gave aerial photographs that stood in for ground checks.^: 28

Growing

The surveys assign Kandahar to their Southern region, on which the Southern Afghanistan growing region is drawn. Its farmers sowed between mid-April and June in 2009, in April to June in 2010 and in March to June in 2011; they harvested in November to December in 2010 and in September to December in 2011.^{: 20: 25: 37} In 2009 cannabis was a steadier crop in the south than elsewhere: 44 per cent of the Southern region's cannabis farmers had grown it in every year since 2004, against 7 per cent in the other regions, and the survey called it "a more permanent feature of the agricultural portfolio of households" there.^: 17 In 2011, 69 per cent of the region's cannabis farmers also grew opium poppy, and cannabis took 22 per cent of the area they planted to cash crops, against 19 per cent for poppy.^{: 29, 32}

Farmers in the Southern region named three varieties in 2009: Mazari, Kandahari and Spera botay, which the survey glosses as Brown Bush.^: 15 Mazari (Balkhi) was the variety most often reported in the region in 2010 and 2011, at 54 and 52 per cent of farmers' reports.^: 19: 37

In the Southern, Eastern and Central regions farmers combined the first and second yields of sieving the threshed plants as their first grade of resin powder, or garda, and a few southern farmers reported a fourth grade.^: 22 The survey describes a southern way of making hashish by hand: first garda is pressed between the palms until it holds together, lower grades with a little water, and the mass is warmed over a low flame and rubbed again until it is "cooked".^: 26

Trade and seizures

The 2009 survey named Spin Boldak with Dehnaw in Uruzgan as the "most famous" cannabis trading centres in the south, and as a centre for turning garda into hashish. Traders there had begun to use machines from Pakistan for the work.^: 35 The commentary signed by the UNODC's executive director placed hubs of the trade, which it said followed the opium trafficking routes, in Balkh, Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces.^: 5

Kandahar had the second-largest provincial total of hashish seized by the Counter Narcotics Police in 2007, 9,266 kg. In 2008 the province had 244,638 kg, most of it from a single operation close to the Pakistan border, and in 2009 6,765 kg.^{: 5, 40–41} The lowest farm-gate price of garda in the survey's monthly series from 2006 to 2010, about US$19 a kilogram, was recorded in Kandahar in July 2008.^: 38 Prices in Kandahar fell after the 2010 harvest, though they stayed much higher than the year before.^: 39

History

In the 1960s, when travellers on the Hippie Trail came to Afghanistan for its hashish, teahouses (saqikhana) that served only users of charas could be found in Kandahar. Cannabis growing, banned under the Taliban government, resumed in Kandahar and other provinces after its fall in late 2001.^{: para. 9, 14, 19}

In October 2006 General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defence staff, said that Canadian troops fighting the Taliban had met "almost impenetrable forests" of cannabis about ten feet tall, which the fighters used as cover. The troops had tried to burn the plants with white phosphorus and with diesel, and failed because the plants were full of water. NBC News's copy of the report carries a photograph of a cannabis field outside Panjwayi, in Kandahar Province, that the Taliban were reported to have used for cover.

Herbarium specimens

Richard Evans Schultes collected cannabis near the city of Kandahar between 13 and 20 December 1971. In 2020 John McPartland and Ernest Small made one of his specimens, Schultes 26505, the epitype of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica.^: 98 His other sheets from that week are Schultes 26503 (1971), Schultes 26504 (1971) and Schultes 26508 (1971).

Appellations

No appellation pages exist for this growing area yet.

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Locality	Elevation	Collected
RSC-AFG-KAN-0120190001	Kandahar General Population 2019			2019
RSC-AFG-KAN-0120190001-R1	2019 RSC Kandahar Reproduction			2019
VIB-AFG-KAN-0100000001	Kandahar General Population

The accessions are seed lots sold or bred on by The Real Seed Company and catalogued by the Vibes Collective. The Real Seed Company's listing says its line was collected outside the city of Kandahar, and gives no district or village.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.

See also

• Afghanistan
• Helmand
• Balkh
• Charas