Presenters:
Joy Ndamukunda
University of Southern California
The Taliban’s push to upgrade Afghanistan’s water infrastructure using dams has raised tensions with neighboring countries and brought questions about the effectiveness of dams. This project will examine this issue using the spatial distribution of opium cultivation from 2019 to 2021 to explore the effects of opium production near dams before, during, and after the Taliban takeover. I used Google Maps to locate Afghanistan’s nineteen operational dams and the predicted opium cultivation maps. The results show that though Afghanistan’s rural regions are known to have high rates of poverty, there was little to no opium presence. Contrastingly, while the wealthiest province that resides in the west, Herat, remained poppy-free, the north, west, and south regions saw the most opium presence. Thus, the influence of dam infrastructures in Afghanistan is that a higher amount of dams lessens the amount of opium cultivation. This revelation is important because the common notion is that opium cultivation occurs due to those living in poverty; however, this reveals that when those who live in impoverished regions have substantial access to dam infrastructure, they will most likely grow other crops rather than opium. My StoryMap presentation will visually showcase this new insight and detail the reasons for this phenomenon.
