The trouble is that unlike Mr Samad, most farmers buying pumps are not growing onions. His neighbours’ fields are full of pink and white poppies. They are used to make heroin, which is sold to middlemen and shipped to Europe and elsewhere via Iran and Pakistan. According to the United Nations, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is close to its highest level since monitoring began in 1994. Muhammad Salim, a poppy farmer in another part of the province, says that he cannot afford to grow any other crop. Mr Samad says that he too would grow poppies, but his land is fertile and near a road, so he is better off growing vegetables. “It is best to grow poppies in the desert,” he says.
Entire new communities have grown up of late to do just that, according to Mr Mansfield. In a country where a typical woman has five children, and where land is fought over, the expansion of arable land is invaluable. As many as 2.5m people may now live in what used to be desert. The price of desert land has soared, from as little as $35 for a jereb (about 2,000 square metres) to over $1,000 now. That has made landowners rich, not to mention politicians and senior police officers.
There are drawbacks, however, even locally. Opium helps to fund the Taliban, as well as pro-government warlords who are scarcely better. The reclaimed territory is mostly untouched by the government: indeed, many of the settlers are people who are rather hostile to state-building. Other Helmandis call them “the wildmen”, Mr Mansfield says.
There is also a big cost to the environment. Though there are no hard data, excessive drilling is “100%” lowering the water table, says Muhammad Wali, a turban-clad elder in Panjwai district who serves as the local mirabu or water manager. “Groundwater is for drinking, not for farming,” he says. Drinking wells are increasingly contaminated with nitrates from cheap fertilisers, which have spread alongside pumps. Shallow wells have gone completely dry. If the groundwater is exhausted, millions will have to move again.