Pubdate: Sat, 17 Aug 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Pamela Constable

AFGHAN FARMERS THREATENING TO REPLANT OPIUM POPPIES

Eradication Efforts Hindered by Disputes Over Compensation

CHAPARHAR, Afghanistan -- Three months ago, a truckload of government 
workers arrived at Malik Ziauddin's village, accompanied by armed guards. 
Wielding sticks and sickles, they beat and chopped at his prized crop until 
only useless green pulp was left.

Ziauddin, a sunburned 65-year-old farmer, watched with mingled regret and 
anticipation. Like thousands of other farmers who grow opium poppies in 
Afghanistan, he had been promised $350 in cash for each fifteenth of an 
acre that was destroyed -- far less than drug smugglers normally paid, but 
still a tempting deal.

By last week, however, none of the money had reached the poppy farmers in 
Ziauddin's village, parched by four years of drought that thirstier crops 
such as wheat cannot withstand. The villagers vowed angrily that if they 
are not paid soon, they will start growing poppies again.

"We know poppy causes problems for people in other parts of the world, and 
we would not grow it if we had water," Ziauddin said. "Every time we go to 
the city for our money, they tell us to come back later. . . . This is our 
livelihood. Soon we will have no choice but to plant."

The frustration expressed by Ziauddin and his neighbors is the unintended 
fallout from an internationally backed effort to eradicate poppy 
cultivation in Afghanistan, which produces about 75 percent of the opium 
used for making heroin worldwide. Repeatedly undermined by a variety of 
problems, including subterfuge and sabotage by growers, logistical delays, 
political rivalries and physical violence, the ambitious three-month effort 
ended recently with only 25 percent of the crop destroyed and the rest 
making its way through the illegal pipeline to addicts in the West.

Poppies have been harvested in small amounts for generations in 
Afghanistan, but as world demand for heroin soared in the 1960s and '70s, 
more and more Afghan farmers switched to poppies, which yield 20 times the 
price of wheat.

Poppy cultivation peaked in 1999, with 225,000 acres sown and 5,050 tons of 
opium produced, while most of Afghanistan was ruled by the Islamic Taliban 
movement. But the Taliban suddenly banned the crop and succeeded in 
virtually wiping it out, with only 19,000 acres grown last year, according 
to the U.N. Drug Control Program.

After the Taliban collapsed last November under a U.S.-led military 
assault, however, many farmers returned to growing poppies. By February, a 
U.N. land survey predicted that 2,095 to 2,975 tons of opium would be 
produced in Afghanistan this year.

"People weren't sure whether the Taliban were going to fall or not last 
year, so some planted poppy and some didn't, but already the level is back 
up to about half what it was," said Mohammed Alim, the U.N. program's 
regional director in Jalalabad.

The government of President Hamid Karzai, which was installed by the United 
Nations in December with Western backing, came under strong foreign 
pressure to halt the poppy revival, and in February Karzai banned production.

As a short-term incentive, the British government offered to subsidize 
farmers who agreed to destroy their plants. Most of the heroin consumed in 
Britain originates in Afghanistan. Other donors promised longer-term 
projects to dig wells and irrigation canals so farmers could switch back to 
edible crops.

Eradication began in April, and one of its major targets was here in 
Nangahar province, a rich agricultural region in eastern Afghanistan that 
is a major poppy producer. Abdul Qadir, then the provincial governor, 
visited numerous villages urging farmers to comply, but last month he was 
assassinated in Kabul, where he had just been named a vice president.

"He asked us not to grow poppy, and we told him we had no water to grow 
anything else. He promised to bring us water, and because we respected him 
as an elder, we obeyed," said Sahar Gul, 80, a farmer in Qadir's native 
Sukh Rod district. "Two or three days later, he was killed. Now we don't 
know whether we will get water or not."

But the anti-poppy drive in Nangahar was plagued by other problems long 
before Qadir's death. In Shinwar district, mobs of angry farmers blocked 
the roads to prevent eradication teams from proceeding. In Chaparhar and 
other districts, officials said some farmers claimed their poppy fields 
were far larger than government surveys showed, and others harvested early 
to beat the eradication deadline.

According to a British official who worked with the program, government 
videotapes of workers chopping down poppy plants showed farmers in the 
background, frantically slitting poppy bulbs to obtain as much opium sap as 
possible before the plants were crushed.

"They wanted to have their cake and eat it too," said the official, adding 
that Qadir's personal eradication drive was conducted without the necessary 
supervision, leaving many crop areas unsurveyed and proper payment 
virtually impossible to calculate. "Everything went out of control," he said.

By last month, workers had chopped down more than 41,000 acres of plants in 
Nangahar and the other principal growing regions, and at least $11 million 
had been doled out to complying farmers in Nangahar alone.

But officials stopped the eradication program with only a little over 25 
percent of the crop destroyed. They also suspended the delivery of payments 
in areas where they suspected farmers had inflated their crop size or 
harvested early, and where disputes had arisen over the proper payment.

Gul Agha Hasini, director of a nonprofit agency in Jalalabad that acted as 
intermediary between the farmers and foreign donors, estimated that while 
about 135,000 one-fifteenth-acre plots have been chopped down in Nangahar, 
farmers have been paid for only about 32,000.

"It has not been a successful process," he said. "What people really need 
are wells and irrigation channels and roads and jobs. If this 
rehabilitation work gets underway, I guarantee you nobody will grow poppy. 
But if it doesn't, they definitely will."

Din Mohammed, the older brother of Qadir who was recently named to replace 
him as governor, said last week that he supports the anti- poppy cause but 
opposes giving farmers cash for their crops. He said he would rather see 
international donors bring in long-term rural economic development projects.

"We need to start this work now, not wait until the poppy is in the ground 
again," Mohammed said in an interview. Noting that Nangahar borders the 
lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, where some Taliban and al Qaeda forces 
are believed to be hiding, he said that if the farmers are "unhappy with 
us, they may join the opposition."

In Chaparhar district, a parched and desolate area dotted with ruins where 
Taliban and al Qaeda fighters once lived, angry poppy farmers said last 
week that they are not eager to defy the government. But unless they are 
paid, they warned, they will soon unwrap their precious hoards of tiny 
poppy seeds and begin planting them.

"We are not in love with poppy. We grow it because we have to," said a 
farmer named Mohammed Azim. "The government has destroyed our land and then 
paid us nothing. We had 240 [irrigation channels], and they have all dried 
up. Even the trees have died. If we don't get our due very soon, we are 
ready to start growing again."
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