Poppy cultivation spreads in Balochistan after Afghan ban, reports say

Opium poppy cultivation has expanded in Pakistan's Balochistan and in Iran's Sistan and Baluchestan province following the ban on poppy farming in Afghanistan, according to two independent reports.

Atlas News Agency reported that poppy cultivation is spreading in the Balochistan region after the Afghan ban. Omid Radio carried the same development, naming Pakistan's Balochistan and Iran's Sistan and Baluchestan: the Iranian name for its side of the same borderland.

Neither report, as published, gave the area under cultivation, the size of the expected harvest or the number of districts affected. Neither offered a figure that would allow the reported expansion to be measured against earlier years, and neither named the districts where the crop is said to have spread. The two accounts agree on the central claim: that cultivation has grown on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border since the ban took effect in Afghanistan.

The reports place the expansion in a region that spans two national borders. Balochistan shares a long, thinly populated and lightly patrolled frontier with Afghanistan to the north-west and with Iran to the west, and Sistan and Baluchestan lies directly across the Iranian side of that line. The terrain and the sparse presence of law enforcement along these stretches have long made them difficult to monitor.

Neither report carried any statement from the Balochistan government in Quetta, from Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force, or from the provincial authorities in Sistan and Baluchestan. No Pakistani or Iranian official was quoted in either account confirming or disputing the reported expansion, and no independent survey data was cited.

The two outlets did not say how they had established that cultivation had increased, whether from field reporting, local officials, farmers or satellite imagery. Skardu Times could not independently verify the claim.

The reports do not address what the expansion would mean for enforcement, for farm incomes in the affected districts, or for the price of opium and its derivatives in regional markets.