WORLD NEEDS AN OPIUM MARKETING BOARD: REPORT

Former NATO Official Criticizes Poppy-Eradication Programs

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 policy,
only drives farmers closer to 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.

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 the 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.

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.

Smith said Thursday his group has no specific plan to implement an
opium marketing board. He's not the first to suggest the idea.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told a British magazine recently
that western governments should buy the Afghan poppy crop. John
Ralston Saul, the Canadian author and philosopher, also raised the
marketing board idea last summer, based on visits to Afghanistan with
his wife, former governor general Adrienne Clarkson. And the Senlis
Council, a British think-tank, proposed a poppy licensing system for
Afghanistan last year, pointing to U.S. agreements with Turkey aimed
at reducing that country's massive heroin output during the early-1970s.

Smith said the CDFAI report aimed to find a common ground between
opponents of the Afghan mission who want withdrawal, and those who
believe Canada's policies should remain unchanged.

The report also criticized Canada's allies in continental Europe for
failing to appreciate the gravity of Afghanistan's teetering status
within their own national interests.