AFGHAN OPIUM FIGHT HURTS POOREST

Report: Heroin Trade Thrives

U.S. and European efforts to end heroin production in Afghanistan
have done little to hamper the drug industry and have hurt the
country's poorest people, according to a report by the United Nations
and the World Bank.

The report, released today, is the latest indication of the
difficulties faced by the British-led effort to eradicate
Afghanistan's opium crop, which drives the economy in parts of the
embattled nation and has helped to fund a resurgence of the Taliban.
The report says the cultivation of poppies that produce opium, from
which heroin is made, permeates daily life in Afghanistan, and
eliminating the illegal drug trade there could take decades.

The opium trade accounts for about $2.7 billion in Afghanistan's
economy -- equal to more than one-third of the nation's gross
domestic product -- and is responsible for thousands of jobs, the
report says. The Taliban government, which had harbored al-Qaeda,
virtually eliminated opium production in 2001, before U.S.-led forces
toppled it. Production has soared since, even as the United States
and its allies have stepped up efforts to kill fields of opium and
persuade farmers to grow other crops.

Opium has remained the nation's most lucrative crop by far, and drug
traffickers -- through incentives and intimidation -- have kept
farmers in the opium business across Afghanistan, which the United
Nations says produces about 87% of the world's opium. Last year,
according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
Afghanistan produced 4,100 metric tons of opium, nearly as much as
the biggest harvest in 1999. The U.N. predicts a record harvest in 2007.

Today's report describes how opium farmers' flexibility has helped
harvests increase. When government officials end the opium trade in
one province, opium brokers typically move cultivation and trade
elsewhere, the report says.

Counternarcotics efforts also have fueled corruption, the report
says. Farmers who can afford it have bribed local officials to
preserve opium crops, while the poorest farmers have been driven
deeper into debt when their crops are destroyed, the report says.
Investigators found several instances in which farmers planned to
replant opium to pay their debts.

The report also says local government officials sometimes help drug
lords drive competitors out of the market in exchange for a cut of
the profits or protection payments.

Antonio Maria Costa of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime has
recommended focusing agents on areas with less opium cultivation to
keep such farming from spreading and help establish an alternative
economy. The U.S. State Department's Anne Patterson, acknowledging
"there is no silver bullet" to the opium problem, has said much of
the growth in production is in areas with weak local governments.