Pubdate: Sat, 10 Nov 2007
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2007 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Patrick Wintour, political editor The Guardian
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

UK'S NEW AFGHANISTAN PLAN: PAY FARMERS TO DITCH OPIUM

Troops May Target Drugs Factories As Part of Strategy to Combat Taliban

Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in 
Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a 
wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime 
minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.

The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the 
rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just 
muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative 
ideas on opium eradication.

Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a 
system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural 
policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government 
is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the 
World Bank.

British and allied forces are also looking at destroying drug 
factories inside Afghanistan, and a much better-targeted drive 
against the big traffickers responsible for 90% of the opium which 
reaches the west.

Mr Brown is expected to make a Commons statement on security and 
development in Afghanistan in the next few weeks, and is likely to 
highlight the strategic importance of the war against the Taliban in 
his first annual foreign affairs speech at Mansion House on Monday.

The focus on Afghanistan comes as British troop levels there are now 
higher than in Iraq. There are approximately 7,700 British troops in 
Afghanistan, compared with around 5,000 in Iraq.

Critics in the British aid agencies claim that too little western aid 
is set aside to provide alternative livelihoods for opium farmers in 
Afghanistan, and comparatively too much going on building state 
structures or funding public sector salaries.

Senior British officers believe the Afghan war remains largely 
misunderstood in Britain, and say security is the precondition for 
building alternatives to opium production. Lord Malloch-Brown 
recently returned from Afghanistan to tell peers: "The Department of 
International Development is looking at whether we can put on a more 
formal and structured long-term basis what one would controversially 
describe as an Afghan equivalent of a CAP, with subsidised purchase 
of legal crops to make returns more like those from poppy."

But he added: "We have to do a much better job of not targeting the 
farmers, the producers whose hearts and minds we are trying to win in 
the counter-insurgency effort. We have to target the industry above 
that - the financiers, the shippers, the drug big men who are 
benefiting from the production. We know who they are and the 
government of Afghanistan know who they are. A system banning them 
from travel, listing them and freezing their bank accounts, hitting 
at the industry's infrastructure, strikes me as an area in which more 
can be done."

He pointedly added that only the US favoured aerial spraying of opium crops.

Illegal Afghan opium was selling for as much as $125 per kilo in 
2006. The UN said the area under cultivation rose this year from 
165,000 to 193,000 hectares and the harvest rose from 6,100 to 8,200 tonnes.

Opium production is heavily concentrated in areas of insecurity, with 
the British area of responsibility in Helmand now the world's biggest 
source of illicit drugs.

The UK has provided $20m to an Afghan criminal justice taskforce that 
has managed to secure only 400 convictions.

Some influential figures, including the former Foreign Office 
permanent secretary Lord Jay, have become so despairing of the fight 
that they are backing calls for opium to be produced legally and used 
as medical morphine, but the idea appears to have been rejected.

Christian Aid has also called for an aid switch to improving 
irrigation and water management; achieving food security through 
expanded cereal production; credit facilities for farmers; and 
building export markets for fruit and nuts. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake