Eminent Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin is sounding the alarm about rising wheat prices in South Asia. Seeking to tamp down food inflation, Pakistan has reduced its exports of wheat to Afghanistan. That could lead to dangerous riots and civil unrest north of the Durand Line and provide a potent political issue for the Taliban to exploit. The flip side, Rubin notes, is that the rising prices of farm products ought to make crop-substitution programs more viable:

Nonetheless, the rise in price in wheat and other commodities (what is happening to horticultural commodities, flowers, essential oils, and so on?) presents an opportunity for investing in other cash crops and their marketing in Afghanistan. For all the rhetoric about how the drug economy is supporting insurgency and terrorism, where is the program to seize this market opportunity? And for all the talk of the importance of Afghanistan to global security, where is the program to assure Afghans of an affordable supply of basic food?

Indeed, the lack of creativity on this front has been astonishing. A few weeks back, I attended a Cato Institute luncheon with Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States. Noting that opium traffickers often loan farmers the money to plant and fertilize the opium harvest for the coming year, I asked the ambassador what programs are in place to provide loan support for farmers who want to grow alternative crops. According to him, there are essentially none. So if you're an Afghan farmer who wants to grow wheat or strawberries instead of opium poppies, you're largely on your own. And we wonder why Afghanistan now supplies 93 percent of the world's opiates.