Abstract Summary/Description
When moving away from illicit crops and imposing sweeping restrictions, governments face unintended consequences, raising questions about who bears the distributional effects and how they cope with them. In April 2022, the Taliban imposed a ban on opium cultivation in Afghanistan. As opium was the main cash crop cultivated in many parts of the country, the ban upended the livelihoods of farmers and cultivators. Leveraging spatial variation in satellite-derived measures of opium cultivation along with detailed household survey data, we examine whether the ban had any effect on food security in the affected areas. Our findings from a difference-in-differences framework suggest that high food insecurity emerged in the immediate aftermath of the ban but gradually diminished over time. Results show a substantial increase in the likelihood of facing an extreme level of food insecurity - nearly a quarter of the pre-ban mean, whereby the effect is pronounced only for households unable to transition their production from opium to grains. Households cope with extreme food insecurity by reducing food consumption frequency and limiting portion sizes in the short run, selling livestock, and shifting production from opium to wheat on arable-for-grain soils in the medium run.
