U.N. HAILS DROP IN OPIUM FARMING

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - International efforts to discourage farmers in
Afghanistan from growing opium - a suspected cash crop for Osama bin
Laden's terrorism network - are paying off, the United Nations'
anti-crime czar said Friday.

Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the U.N. Office for Drug Control
and Crime Prevention, said programs designed to get farmers to grow
other crops instead of opium, which is used to make heroin, were
choking off the flow of cash to terrorists.

"This will dramatically reduce the movement of heroin from
Afghanistan to the West," he said.

Until this year, Afghanistan was the world's No. 1 source of opium and
produced 4,000 tons annually - three quarters of the global supply.
But there has been no sign of any new cultivation of opium poppy this
year, Arlacchi said.

Experts believe there are still 100 tons in storage in Afghanistan.
"But stockpiles don't last forever, and if there is no production, no
replanting, we will see a dramatic effect on the world market,"
Arlacchi said. Already, the wholesale price per kilogram has soared
from $30 to $500-600, he said.

To encourage programs that pay Afghan farmers to grow something else,
the Bush administration recently gave the U.N. drug control agency
$1.5 million.

The United Nations can take only partial credit for the huge drop in
opium production: Afghanistan is suffering the effects of a severe
drought that has crippled all kinds of farming. And the ruling
Taliban, while sheltering bin Laden and members of his al-Qaida
network, last year banned growing and using opium as un-Islamic.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, said in Washington that there were strong indications that
bin Laden's group has profited handsomely from the opium trade.

Kerry called the addiction and crime created by heroin trafficking in
the United States part of a terrorist strategy to exact "their
revenge on the world ... (and) get as many people drugged out and
screwed up as you can."

Arlacchi also called Friday for the swift ratification of
international conventions he said could help the fight against terrorism.

Only three nations - Britain, Botswana and Sri Lanka - have ratified
the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing
of Terrorism, and at least 22 countries must ratify it before it can
take effect. The United States signed the measure, but Congress has
not yet ratified it.

Among other things, that convention eliminates the traditional notion
of secrecy that banks in many countries have used as an excuse not to
cooperate with investigators who are trying to pinpoint, freeze or
seize terrorist funds.

"These terrorists are shrewd and fanatical. They are players in the
global financial markets," he said.