Taliban leaders, seeking international acceptance after seizing power in Afghanistan, have told farmers to stop cultivating opium poppies, residents of some major poppy-growing areas say. This has caused raw opium prices to soar across the country.

In recent days, Taliban representatives began telling gatherings of villagers in the southern province of Kandahar, one of the country’s main opium-producing regions, that the crop—a crucial part of the local economy—would now be banned.

This followed a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid at an Aug. 18 news conference in Kabul that the country’s new rulers won’t permit the drug trade. Mr. Mujahid at the time didn’t offer details of how the Islamist group intends to enforce the ban.

Local farmers in Kandahar, Uruzgan and Helman provinces said raw opium prices have tripled, from about $70 to about $200 per kilogram, due to uncertainty about future production. In the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the opium price has doubled, residents there said. Raw opium is processed into heroin.

Poppies are one of the few cash crops available to farmers in Afghanistan.

Photo: Reuters

The Taliban have long been one of the narcotics industry’s top beneficiaries, using taxation of the drug business to finance their 20-year insurgency, Western governments say. Afghanistan accounts for some 80% of the world’s illicit opiates exports, and the poppy-planting season starts in about a month.

Two decades of U.S. attempts to curb Afghanistan’s drug business have failed, partly due to the huge political cost of alienating Afghan farmers who depend on the poppy crops for their livelihoods.

Taliban attempts to do the same could undermine public support for the group and deprive its new administration of an important source of revenue at a time when Afghanistan is cut off from the global financial system and foreign aid.

An opium farmer in Kandahar, who attended a recent meeting between villagers and the Taliban, said in a phone interview that farmers were unhappy but would have no choice but to obey if the Taliban move to enforce the prohibition.

As America ends its war in Afghanistan after 20 years, a WSJ analysis of data shows how the Taliban gradually took back control of the country and expanded its military presence after being toppled in 2001. Photo Illustration: George Downs The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

“We can’t oppose the Taliban’s decision,” he said. “They are the government.” The farmer said the Taliban have told people to grow other crops, such as saffron. “They’ve told us that when we ban poppies, we’ll make sure you have an alternative crop.”

With Afghanistan’s rutted roads, poor storage infrastructure and few export outlets, poppies are one of the few cash crops available to local farmers. Saffron—which used to be a key element of U.S. counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan—is another, but it is nowhere near as lucrative or as easy to sell.

“If the Taliban prohibit the cultivation of poppy, people will die from starvation, especially when international aid stops,” a poppy farmer in the Chora district of Uruzgan said in a phone interview. “We still hope they will let us grow poppies. Nothing can compensate for the income we get from growing poppies.”

When the Taliban were in power before the 2001 U.S. invasion, they also initially banned opium production, but later punished only the consumption of drugs, not their cultivation and trading. The Taliban did, however, dramatically crack down on opium cultivation in 2000, when they sought international acceptance for their regime.

A group of heroin smokers in Kabul last month. Outside the country, the main markets for Afghan heroin are in Europe, Russia and Iran.

Photo: Paula Bronstein for The Wall Street Journal

That prohibition drove down production by 90%, said Vanda Felhab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who follows Afghanistan. Yet, it came at a huge political cost for the group.

By the spring of 2001, Afghan farmers were flouting the ban because they couldn’t cope, Ms. Felhab-Brown said. That move to curb opium crops, she added, turned into a key reason why “no one was lining up on the side of the Taliban during the U.S. invasion.”

After 2001, the U.S. spent some $9 billion over 20 years trying to prevent Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin, to no avail. Led mostly by the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. efforts included paying farmers to destroy their poppies, a policy that ignited a poppy-growing fever among others trying to cash in.

The U.S. also funded Afghan eradication teams that turned impoverished farmers’ crops into mulch, enraging communities.

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Washington gave up on eradication by 2010, partly because the effort pushed large parts of the rural population to join the Taliban. The U.S. Agency for International Development worked to persuade Afghan farmers to grow saffron, pistachios or pomegranates instead. But export opportunities for those products were scarce.

Last year, Afghan farmers grew poppies on land four times the size of what they did in 2002.

A new Taliban opium prohibition would be a political risk for the group. It could win them a degree of gratitude from foreign governments, particularly in Europe, Russia and Iran, the main markets for Afghan heroin.

Unlike the 1990s, when the Taliban had to contend with powerful, foreign-backed Northern Alliance militias that retained control of the country’s northeast, the Islamist movement today doesn’t face any serious military challenge to its rule. It does, however, need to contend with potential discontent caused by the country’s economic crisis.

With a U.S. freeze on central-bank assets and billions of dollars in foreign aid drying up, the new Taliban authorities in Kabul are hard pressed to stave off economic collapse. Prices of basic commodities like cooking oil have already surged, while imports are growing scarce.

Bags of methamphetamine in Jakarta that in recent months had been smuggled in from Afghanistan, which historically had been known as a source for just opium.

Photo: mariana/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

As an insurgent movement, the Taliban profited heavily from the opium trade in the past two decades, according to Western governments and the United Nations. They established shadow governments across the country, building a parallel economy that was sustained in large part by the trafficking of drugs and smuggling of fuel and consumer goods.

It isn’t just opium and its derivatives anymore. Afghanistan has also seen the emergence of a large-scale methamphetamine production. In one district, Bakwa, in the southwestern province of Farah, crystal-meth production has become a cottage industry, according to David Mansfield, an independent socio-economist and Afghanistan expert.

His team of researchers documented more than 300 suspected labs there that can produce annually crystal meth worth some $240 million. Approximately $4 million of that amount went to the Taliban, primarily through taxes, Mr. Mansfield estimated.

Iranian authorities seized 17 tons of methamphetamine from March 2019 to March 2020, and another 10 tons from March 2020 to November 2020, the vast majority of which came from Afghanistan, according to Alexander Soderholm, an independent consultant researching illicit drug flows through Iran at the London School of Economics.

At the highest levels of the Taliban leadership, officials appeared to see the drug trade as a vital undertaking. During peace talks with the U.S. in 2020, Taliban negotiators asked for the release of Hajji Bashar Noorzai, a drug kingpin imprisoned in the U.S., which the now-toppled Afghan government said was an attempt to boost the insurgents’ drug-smuggling capabilities.

“He has no other skill,” said Khalid Mohid, who served as spokesman for the Afghan Counter Narcotics Justice Center, a counternarcotics investigative and prosecuting body of the deposed Afghan republic. Mr. Noorzai, sentenced by a U.S. federal judge in 2009 to life imprisonment on heroin trafficking charges, remains behind bars.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com and James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com