Newsweek has quite a shocking and in-depth report up about so-called “opium brides.” It seems that some opium farmers can’t pay back their loans: instead of repaying those loans, then, they’re forced to sell their daughters. Opium farmers were never rich, they were simply able to get by, but the war in Afghanistan has changed even that; no longer are they able to take care of themselves, let alone their family.

The US and Afghani government want to destroy the country’s opium industry. Most of the heroine being sold in the West comes from Afghanistan (approximately 93%); there drugs give thousands of people an income, here they ruin lives.

Here hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, are addicted to heroine and alike, and they have only one goal; to get another shot. Here those dependent on opiates can’t do anything. They only live for the drugs, they can’t keep a job, many of them are homeless.

But there, there in Afghanistan the situation is completely different: the country counts approximately 500,000 poppy farmers. Although the farmers don’t earn enough to be rich, they do normally earn enough to get by: most money, most profit, is made by the so-called traffickers, drugdealers and, of course, the Taliban.

Here drugs make people lose money; there opium gives a farmer a reasonable income ($2000). Here we suffer financially; in Afghanistan “the country’s well-oiled narcotics machine generates in excess of $4 billion a year from exports of processed opium and heroin—more than half of Afghanistan’s $7.5 billion GDP, according to the UNODC.”

Khalida’s father says she’s 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.

The family’s heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family’s little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah’s entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. “It’s my fate,” the child says.

Afghans call the young girls who are being sold “loan brides.” Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, has called on opium farmers not to “give their daughters for money; they shouldn’t give them to old men, and they shouldn’t give them in forced marriages.”

However, for the farmers there’s no other option left: if they don’t repay their loans by selling their daughters, they’re killed.

This isn’t the first time that such a situation exist, even though the American and Afghani view on opium has made matters worse: in 2000 the leader of the Taliban banned poppy growing. Then too, farmers were forced to sell their young daughters.

The main question is, of course, what to do about it. We can’t let them grow poppy, we can’t let them continue to destroy the lives of many thousands of people, just to earn a living. On the other hand, the Afghan government and its US ally can’t destroy the crops either; they’re ruining many lives when they do so.

It seems to me that the Afghan government, the US and other allied nations - such as the Netherlands - should repay the Afghan farmers; give them money so they can pay back their loans and they don’t have to sell their daughters. Not only that, we should also teach them how to grow other crops; they’ve got to produce other products.

That means that the West has to invest bigtime in Afghan farmers, but we can’t allow the “opium brides” practice to continue. Besides, the worse the situation becomes for Afghanistan’s opium farmers, and there are quite many of them, the more likely it is that they’ll turn to the Taliban, and turn their backs on the country’s central government, let alone its Western allies.