Pubdate: Fri, 16 Feb 2001
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2001 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
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Author: Kathy Gannon, Associated Press

NO POPPIES FOR OPIUM, U.N. CONTROL TEAM SAYS

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- U.N. drug-control officers said the Taliban 
religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan 
- -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation in 
July.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks 
searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so 
few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan 
this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said 
Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and 
Pakistan.

He laid out photographs of vast fields cultivated with wheat alongside 
pictures of the same sites taken in 2000 -- a sea of blood-red poppies.

The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would 
make its own estimate of the poppy crop. "We do not think by any stretch of 
the imagination that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been eliminated. 
But we, like the rest of the world, welcome positive news."

No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of security 
concerns stemming from the presence of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 
percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said.

Opium -- the milky substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted 
into heroin and sold in Europe and North America.

The 2000 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations 
said -- more than all other countries combined, including the "Golden 
Triangle," where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing 
before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict 
making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of 
Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed 
farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. team members, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed 
Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others 
- -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan 
last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of 
the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, 
Frahi said. The rest -- about 175,000 acres -- was clean.

"We have to look at the situation with careful optimism," said Sandro Tucci 
of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that, 
as a result, there hasn't been any production of opium -- but that 
officials would keep checking.

Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey was done 
now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the poppies to have been 
harvested already.

The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands under 
Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile, have not 
traditionally been poppy-growing areas and farmers are struggling to raise 
any crops at all because of severe drought. The rest of the land held by 
the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where poppies could not grow.

Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of 
Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in fields 
where they once grew poppies.

"It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were filled 
with poppies and this year there is wheat," he said.

But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world's poorest countries, 
shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.

Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with his three 
brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the land brought 
him $1,100.

This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and cattle 
feed he planted on the entire parcel.

Rehman said he never considered defying the ban. "The Taliban were 
patrolling all the time," he said.
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