INSPECTORS VISIT TO SEE IF AFGHANISTAN'S POPPIES ARE REALLY GONE

Inspectors from skeptical foreign governments began crisscrossing
Afghanistan on Wednesday to check claims that the world's main
producer of opium, the sticky sap used to make heroin, has wiped out
the crop in less than a year.

Fields of green poppy pods, a major cash crop in the war- and
drought-stricken country, were banned in July by the ruling Taliban
militia's hardline leader, the reclusive Mullah Mohammed Omar.

The United Nations Drug Control Program sent its own inspectors and
concluded in March that the plants were gone. But countries battling
heroin addiction are doubtful, and on Wednesday they sent a team of 15
investigators, including two Americans, to see for themselves.

Two groups of inspectors will tour southern Afghanistan's Kandahar and
Helmand provinces, as well as eastern Nangarhar province. The regions
produce 80 percent of all poppies grown in the country.

Last year's opium harvest in Afghanistan was 4,000 tons - about 72
percent of illegal production worldwide. Eighty percent of the heroin
produced from Afghan opium was sold on the streets of Europe and about
20 percent went to the United States.

Since the ban, production has stopped, said Sandro Tucci, a spokesman
for the U.N. Drug Control Program in Vienna.

"We are 100 percent convinced that the poppies have been eliminated,"
Tucci told The Associated Press Wednesday in a telephone interview.

Tucci said the foreign inspectors also want to see the ban's effects
on farmers and poor laborers who used to collect the sap by slitting
open the pods.

Afghanistan's farmers are destitute because of the war and drought,
having lost most of their crops and much of their livestock. Poppies
were one of their few cash crops.

Farmers could sell a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of fresh opium for about
$30 last year, a U.S. State Department report said in December. It
takes about 10 kilograms of raw opium to make one kilogram of heroin.

No alternative crop was given to the farmers, and they have received
virtually no international assistance. Lack of funds forced the U.N.
Drug Control Program to shut down in eastern Nangarhar province last
year.

"We did not give them an adequate alternative. We expect this will
cause additional humanitarian problems in Afghanistan," Tucci said.

While U.S. government officials have been barred from Afghanistan
since 1998 because of security concerns, the anti-narcotics mission is
the second foray into the country by Americans in recent weeks.

Last week U.S. officials went on a humanitarian mission to parts of
western and northern Afghanistan to see firsthand the plight of
millions of Afghans driven from their homes by drought and war.

The United States is a leading proponent of sanctions against
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to press it to hand over suspected
terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden for trial.

But Tucci said the United States was also one of the first countries
to respond to UNDCP warnings of a "looming catastrophe" for Afghans
deprived of opium income.