U.N. WANTS WORLDWIDE EFFORT TO ERADICATE DRUG CROPS

The United Nations plans to seek new international backing for the
most ambitious counter-narcotics effort in its history.

But the United States and other wealthy nations are resisting pleas to
fund the program partly because it would spend billions of dollars in
some of the world's most corrupt or repressive nations, such as
Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.

The overall objective of the plan is to eradicate the world's entire
production of heroin, cocaine and marijuana over 10 years.

The cost of the plan has been estimated at $3 billion to $4 billion
over the next 10 years, a roughly four-fold increase from what all
governments combined would spend over the next decade at present
levels to promote the substitution of legal crops for illegal ones,
the officials said.

But President Clinton's top drug-policy aides have advised U.N.
officials that Washington is unwilling to commit substantial new money
to the effort because the program remains unformed, has yet to attract
support from key European and Middle Eastern donors and would probably
provoke political opposition at home from human-rights activists and
critics of the United Nations.

Pino Arlacchi, a former Italian lawmaker who was appointed last
September as the U.N.'s chief counter-narcotics official, nonetheless
vows to pursue the plan.

Arlacchi's idea, which has been sketched out in a 170-page report
entitled "Strategy for Coca and Opium Poppy Elimination," calls for
promoting rural development and crop substitution to create legitimate
employment alternatives to drug production in the nine principal
growing nations: Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar,
Pakistan and Vietnam.

According to U.N. estimates, the amount of land devoted to growing
coca leaf or opium poppy in all these countries is just 4,500 square
kilometers, or half the area of Puerto Rico. That gives supporters of
the program hope that concentrated efforts can overcome the low
success rate of traditional crop-substitution efforts, which many
experts say have failed because of the lack of roads and facilities to
handle legal crops.

Arlacchi said a modest investment in the social and economic
development of drug-growing regions in Pakistan has cut opium
production from 800 to 20 tons a year. The key, he said, was the
introduction of a crop of off-season onions that could be marketed
throughout the year.

Arlacchi's tenure at the United Nations has been distinguished in part
by his desire to try to work out new counter-drug arrangements with
the political rulers of Afghanistan and Myanmar, the countries that
together cultivate 80 percent of the world's illicit opium poppies but
remain in virtual diplomatic isolation.

He already has struck a deal with the Taliban, the Islamic extremist
party that now controls more than two-thirds of Afghanistan, to fund a
series of small-scale development projects such as the reconstruction
of a factory in the province of Kandahar that will provide work for
thousands of impoverished local citizens.

Last month, he organized a similar pilot project in Myanmar.
Washington has pledged $5 million toward the $15 million cost of the
project, which is meant to promote rural development.

In both nations, Arlacchi's idea is to create employment alternatives
to drug-related work. He wants to spend an estimated $500 million
there over the next decade.

But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other top U.S. officials
have said Washington generally opposes substantial new aid to

Afghanistan so long as Taliban ideologues block women from access to
education, jobs and health care.

Checked-by: (trikydik)