POPPY BAN AND DROUGHT FORCING POOR AFGHANS TO TRADE OFF YOUNG DAUGHTERS

With Afghanistan-No Drugs

JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN Dirt-poor farmers, unable to pay their debts
because of a Taliban ban on growing the flower that produces opium, are
trading their young daughters to clear their debts, U.N. and Taliban
officials say.

"I just talked to a farmer who said: 'I gave my small daughter to the one I
got a loan from,"' said Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban's chief
anti-narcotics man in Nangarhar province, which was the second-largest
opium-producing region last year.

Farmers traditionally use opium as a source of credit, borrowing against
the next year's harvest, said Bernard Frahi, director of the U.N. Drug
Control Program in neighboring Afghanistan.

But this year, there was no harvest because of an edict banning cultivation
of the poppy, the crimson-red flower that produces opium.

On Friday a top U.N. official urged quick and comprehensive help for Afghan
farmers.

"Part of the desperation in Afghanistan has arisen because of farmers being
forced to stop cultivation of poppies and having no alternative means of
production, nothing else to fall back on," said Kenzo Oshima, U.N.
Undersecretary General of Humanitarian Assistance. "This is a situation
that clearly requires attention."

Combined with a devastating drought that has killed off entire herds,
destroyed crops, turned 80,000 people into refugees in their own country
and forced another 170,000 fleeing to neighboring Pakistan, the ban has
left many farmers destitute, authorities said.

"I talked to this uncle who gave away his 7-year-old niece whose parents
had died for three bags of 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of wheat,"
Hans-Christian Poulsen of the U.N. office for the coordination of
humanitarian aid to Afghanistan said in western Herat. "This shows how
desperate they are."

In deeply conservative Afghanistan, girls often are married off at puberty.
According to tradition, the family of the groom pays the bride's parents
for their daughters.

But girls are now being handed over in marriage at a much younger age to
grooms who often are in their late 20s and early 30s, Poulsen said.

"The age is going down and they are going much further away to live with
their new husbands," he said.