Pubdate: Fri, 05 Apr 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Dexter Filkins

AFGHANISTAN TO PAY FARMERS FOR UPROOTED POPPIES

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 4 - With this country's vast fields of 
poppies ready to flower soon, Afghan officials said today that they 
would embark on a novel plan to pay farmers to destroy their crops, 
whether they want to or not.

Ashraf Ghani, a senior adviser to Hamid Karzai, the chairman of the 
interim government, said that agents of the Afghan government would 
fan out across three Afghan provinces thought to produce about 90 
percent of the country's opium.

The undisclosed cost will be borne by the United States, Britain and 
other Western countries, which have been pressuring the Afghan 
government to crack down on poppy production. In recent months, there 
have been some suggestions that Western nations would condition aid 
pledged to Afghanistan on efforts by the Karzai government to attack 
poppy cultivation. Mr. Ghani said this was not the case.

Under the plan, the Afghan officials will offer poppy farmers around 
$500 per acre to destroy their plants. If the farmers refuse, Mr. 
Ghani said, the officials will destroy the crops anyway.

The initiative represents a last-ditch effort to forestall a big 
comeback for poppy production in Afghanistan, which had become the 
world's largest supplier of opium until the then-ruling Taliban 
cracked down on production, which led to a sharply reduced harvest 
last year.

After the collapse of the Taliban in the fall, many of the farmers 
who had successfully cultivated poppies rushed to plant again, and 
this year's crop is now expected to be as large as some of those in 
the mid or late 1990's, when the Taliban was encouraging poppy 
production, apparently to raise money.

The initiative announced today is designed to blunt the economic 
impact of curtailing the crop. One proposal is to provide jobs for 
farm laborers who would ordinarily harvest the poppies.

Racing to beat the harvest, which would otherwise begin within weeks, 
government officials will begin handing out cash later this month in 
Badakshan Province in eastern Afghanistan, Helmand Province in the 
south and Nangarhar in the northeast, the three centers of poppy 
production here. The payments, which will be made on the spot, are 
designed to pay the farmer slightly more than what he would have made 
had he grown wheat, not opium poppies.

The initiative raises the possibility of a confrontation between the 
fledgling government and the poppy farmers, who are known for their 
sometimes violent resistance to attempts to prevent them from growing 
their prized crops.

Still, Mr. Ghani said that if the farmers refused to destroy their 
crops, the government was prepared to do the job for them. ``State 
power is based on the legitimate use of force,'' Mr. Ghani said. ``We 
hope it doesn't reach that point.''

In impoverished, drought-stricken Afghanistan, the crop has proved to 
be one of the few reliable sources of a decent income. Poppies also 
use far less water than wheat or corn.

For all these reasons, Western officials have largely abandoned hopes 
of eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop this year. Even so, Mr. Ghani 
and Yunus Qanooni, the interior minister, said that the Karzai 
government was determined to eliminate poppy farming as a viable 
occupation. In a decree signed by Mr. Karzai earlier this week, the 
repayment of loans in opium was prohibited. The practice is 
widespread among poppy farmers and effectively imposes interest rates 
of as much as 500 percent per year on the farmer. Mr. Karzai also 
ordered the closing of opium shops.
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