MARKETING BOARD FOR OPIUM URGED BY EX-NATO OFFICIAL

OTTAWA -- An international marketing board for opium, similar to
Canada's wheat board, would better fight terrorism and the booming
drug trade in Afghanistan instead of current poppy-eradication
programs, a former NATO ambassador says.

Destroying poppy crops, a major plank of American and British
anti-drug policy, only drives farmers closer towards the Taliban,
said Gordon Smith, Canada's NATO ambassador between 1985 and 1990.
He's the lead author of a report released Thursday that urges the
continuation of Canada's military presence beyond the current 2009
deadline, but also says current NATO policies need a shake-up.

His study, prepared for the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and
Foreign Affairs Institute, urged the creation of an international
clearing house to purchase opium crops and prevent money from
entering the hands of Taliban insurgents or traffickers.

Afghanistan remains the largest heroin producing and trafficking
country, producing more than 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy
supply in 2006. That's 172,000 hectares according to recent American
estimates -- a 61 per cent jump from the previous year. Opium exports
account for one-third of the country's combined licit and illicit
GDP, according to th United Nations.

"In a perfect world nobody would be allowed to grow poppies and all
would be well," Smith said Thursday. "It would never be leak-proof.
It's not a frightfully good option, but it's better than any others
that anyone else has come forward with."

Fair opium prices and central regulation by the Afghan government and
foreign states would also help alleviate international morphine
shortages, said Smith, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs
and now the executive director of the University of Victoria's Centre
for Global Studies.

Poppy cultivation remains the only lucrative career choice for many
impoverished Afghans, living under the burden of three continuous
decades of civil war.

But strong links exist between Afghanistan's burgeoning narco-economy
and the Taliban insurgence against NATO and Afghan forces, according
to a U.S. State Department report also released Thursday.

"Traffickers provide weapons, funding, and personnel to the Taliban
in exchange for the production of drug trade routes, poppy fields,
and members of their organizations," the report said.

Barnett Rubin, a former UN adviser on Afghanistan, argued in 2003
that the marketing board concept would represent disaster for small
Afghan farmers, keeping prices low along the lines of African coffee,
tea, and, cocoa boards. An auction house in Kabul, with sales taxed
by the central government, represented a better idea, said Rubin, a
New York University professor.