Nangarhar

Nangarhar
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Geography
Country	Afghanistan
Province/State	Nangarhar Province
Coordinates	34.274, 70.474
Landscape
Area	7,370 km²
Terrain	Approximately Nangarhar Province
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	1
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Nangarhar is a landrace cannabis growing area in eastern Afghanistan, drawn on Nangarhar Province, the province round Jalalabad on the border with Pakistan. 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} Fieldwork by David Mansfield places the crop in the southern districts of Achin, Khogiani, Hisarak and Sherzad, below the Spin Ghar range.^{: 1, 8, 10–11: para. 21, 25}

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. None of the surveys gives an area for a single province.^: 11: 9 The first report shows how cannabis fields in Sherzad district were picked out on a satellite image, and photographs fields there, one of them of cannabis mixed with maize.^{: 14, 57–58} Nangarhar was one of the provinces where surveyors could check the satellite images on the ground, by mapping fields with GPS, in 2009, 2010 and 2011.^{: 49: 50: 47}

The 2011 and 2012 reports were retitled surveys of commercial cannabis and counted only fields where cannabis was grown as a single crop. In both years the satellite images over Nangarhar were placed over the areas where field reports put the crop, while most of the other provinces covered by satellite were sampled at random, and the reports print false-colour satellite images and helicopter photographs of the fields.^{: 11, 16, 44: 14, 27–28}

Growing

The surveys assign Nangarhar to their Eastern region. In 2009 farmers in the east of the province sowed cannabis in June, while those in Hisarak began as early as March.^: 20 The 2010 survey gave July for sowing and December for the harvest in the Eastern region, with March to December in parts of Hisarak, and the 2011 survey May to June and October to December.^: 25: 37

Farmers in Nangarhar grew cannabis mixed with maize, then cut the maize about a month after planting for fodder; the 2009 survey counted such fields as mono-crop cannabis.^: 16–17 The 2011 and 2012 surveys found cannabis on field boundaries and mixed in fields with other crops almost only in the Central and Eastern regions.^: 18: 16 Mansfield found that maize, once the main summer crop of upper Achin, was increasingly grown together with cannabis there from 2010.^: 10

The 2009 survey found Watani the variety most commonly cultivated in Nangarhar; the other varieties it recorded in the Eastern region were Azraki Shadani, Logari Shadani and Machalghu Shadani.^: 15 Watani made up 73 per cent of farmers' reports from the Eastern region in 2010; in 2011 Azraki Shadani was the most common there, at 36 per cent.^: 19: 37 Unlike farmers in the south, those in Nangarhar reported paying no usher tax on their cannabis in 2008, and none in the Eastern region did so in 2010.^: 42: 44

Trade and prices

The 2009 survey named Hesarak and Sherzad as places in the province "famous" for illegal cannabis trading centres.^: 35 Farm-gate prices of garda, the resin powder sieved from the dried plants, rose sharply in Nangarhar and Balkh in the second half of 2009 while other provinces changed little; after the 2010 harvest prices in Nangarhar fell, though they stayed much higher than the year before.^: 37: 39 The Counter Narcotics Police recorded seizures of 5,663 kg of hashish in the province in 2007, 1,200 kg in 2008 and 3,184 kg in 2009.^: 41

Drawing on fieldwork by Mansfield and Paul Fishstein, Bradford and Mansfield report that in 2015 cannabis in Nangarhar was sold as "mixed" chars for the equivalent of US$145 a kilogram. The yield was 12 kg a jerib, about 60 kg a hectare, and the net return was US$1,352 a jerib, against US$424 in Balkh at the other end of the range they give. They suggest that nearness to the market in Pakistan may explain it, and found growing amounts of chars from across Nangarhar being smuggled over the eastern border in the autumn of 2018.^{: para. 23–24}

Bans

According to Bradford and Mansfield, cannabis growing resumed in Nangarhar after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001. It was reduced locally in a number of the province's southern districts while Governor Gul Agha Sherzai enforced a ban on opium between 2008 and 2010.^{: para. 14, 20} In the summer of 2010 cannabis was the first crop to come back below the Spin Ghar: in the province's southern districts Mansfield met households with family members in the army who had grown cannabis that summer and returned to opium poppy in the 2010–11 season.^{: 11: para. 22}

After taking control of the Mahmand valley in Achin in July 2015, Islamic State Khorasan destroyed the standing cannabis crop there and kept a ban on cannabis, and then on opium, until it left the area in the spring of 2017. In the autumn of 2017 its fighters destroyed the harvested crop in Pirakhel and Wazir in Khogiani and closed the local bazaars where hashish was traded, as they had done in Shadal and Abdul Khel in Achin. After they left, fields of cannabis could be seen in the summer of 2018 throughout Khogiani and Achin, and in Hisarak and Sherzad.^{: para. 21}

Bradford and Mansfield write that the crop was no longer limited to the upper reaches of these four districts but was increasingly grown in their lower parts and along the roadside, that the local authorities imposed no restrictions on it, and that in Achin it grew close to United States and Afghan special forces.^{: para. 25}

Appellations

No appellation pages exist for this growing area yet.

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Locality	Elevation	Collected
HCG-AFG-NAN-0120250001	Afghanistan Nangarhar 2025

The accession is a seed line sold by Hippie Cannabis Genetics, whose listing names the province and no place within it.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing area yet.

See also

• Afghanistan
• Pakistan
• Balkh
• Charas