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...next. The opium trade is woven into the fabric of the economy of southern Afghanistan. In Marjah, as elsewhere, the Taliban protected the drug syndicates for a price, reaping millions of dollars from the opium bounty. But ordinary residents benefited from the drug trade too; it provided a lucrative crop for 70,000 farmers and their families, work for laborers and a source of graft for officials. Even the tribal council played a role in the trade, adjudicating disputes between drug lords...
...break that dependency? Many Western and Afghan counternarcotics experts recommend the cold-turkey approach: just destroy the poppy crop and make the farmers plant something else. Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand province, which includes Marjah, favors this plan. But according to Afghan officials, McChrystal and his military commanders have warned that destroying the crop would enrage the population. Mohammed Rahim Khan, who fled the invasion and has just returned to his poppy fields, tells TIME, "I spent lots of money on my field, and so did my neighbors. If the government destroys the fields, nearly all the people will...
...military commanders advocate simply buying up this year's harvest and persuading farmers to grow something else next season. The counternarcotics officials strongly disagree. Paying the farmers would be tantamount to "rewarding criminality," says a Western official. He adds, "These people knew about the offensive, and they planted the crop anyway. They wanted to make a profit." These officials point out that swaths of eastern Afghanistan have been cleared of opium poppy by provincial counternarcotics teams without any farmers' revolt...
...course, they don't see it that way. I've taken my share of barbs from Richman, who considers me something of a boob, albeit a likable one. But I'm not offended, because he pretty much takes it for granted that the current crop of food writers, at least the online ones, are a cacophony of dazzled novices, opining confidently in an intellectual vacuum. And he's not wrong. There are no more authority figures anymore. Sokolov, for his part, regrets the passing of "thorough, objective, anonymous reviewing." That criticism, he tells TIME, is "increasingly relevant as the scale...
...Still, Europe's demand for soya means it has no choice but to import GMOs, since about 75% to 80% of the global soya crop is from transgenic breeds. The E.U. rules mean imported GM food has to be labeled and separated along the supply chain to safeguard against "contamination" of organic farms. Any produce containing more than 0.9% GM content must be labeled as such, a policy that can lead to shipments being sent back...