OPIUM'S BOUNTY

Afghan Farmers Rely On Country's Only Billion-Dollar Export

GHANI KHEL, Afghanistan - Ghulam Said, a tenant farmer who estimated his
age at 75, gave the obvious answer when asked why he scrapes the black sap
from poppies and forms it into mounds of opium to be sold on the world market.

"We are very poor here," Said said while sitting in the shade of a mulberry
tree. "We cannot survive on corn and wheat."

Another farmer in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar proudly
displayed a kilo-sized cake of opium.

Yet another produced two crude tools of the trade: a wooden device to bleed
the sap from the poppy's pod and a small trowel to collect the sap after it
blackens into opium, the raw ingredient of heroin.

Said and his neighbors are producers of this impoverished country's only
billion-dollar export. Afghanistan provides 70 percent of the world's
supply of opium. Most of it is refined into heroin and sold in Europe.

Already, the surrounding fields are tilled and ready to be sown in October
with a new crop of poppy.

Afghanistan also is famous for its hashish, made from marijuana plants
grown in nearby mountains. But opium - and the heroin it produces - is, by
far, the country's top export.

In 2000, the Taliban suppressed poppy cultivation by 96 percent, according
to a United Nations study. But the Taliban enforcers weren't around this
year, routed by the U.S.-led war on terrorism. That military success might
have had one unintended consequence: this year's large opium harvest.

The new Afghan government made a concerted effort to curtail opium
production. Newly installed officials banned it in January and launched an
eradication program in April. President Hamid Karzai proclaimed his
government was "determined like hell to fight the cultivation of poppy."

Almost everyone agrees Karzai failed.

The United Nations estimated that 225,000 acres of poppy were planted this
year and as many as 175,000 acres were harvested.

Local farmers said the eradication program was riddled with corruption.
Most managed to harvest plenty of opium even though men paid by the
government marched through some of their fields destroying the poppy with
sticks.

The program paid farmers for destroyed crops, but many said local warlords
skimmed the payments. In any case, they said, the payment of a few hundred
dollars per acre was far less than the $6,600 they could make cultivating
one acre with poppy.

In the remote, dusty village of Ghani Khel, efforts to stifle the 200-year
tradition of opium production triggered a backlash. Farmers protested after
some of their crops were destroyed under the program, and a raid earlier
this year closed the village's bustling opium market.

"The jail holds 40 people," Said said. "Two thousand of us went down there
and said, 'OK, put us in jail.' "

One farmer, who asked not to be identified, said he farms about 200 acres
with the help of tenant farmers. While he and his tenants grow legal crops
such as rice, wheat and corn, they also sow poppy.

He described the process: They plant in October. By February, 4-foot-high
poppies paint the fields in rich mixtures of red and white. In March,
farmhands use simple, home-fashioned wooden implements to delicately score
the pods at night, causing the pink-white sap to seep out.

The sap mixes with the air during the night and then dries under the sun
into a black, tar-like substance. Workers use a small trowel to scrape off
the opium resin from each pod, which can be harvested up to five times.

The accumulated opium is formed into mounds held together with the leaves
of the poppy plant, which over time dry into a dead, brown protective case
for the opium. From there, the opium mounds are taken to local markets and
sold.

Much of the opium then is refined into heroin in labs in the tribal areas
of Afghanistan before beginning the long journey to markets in Europe, a
route these days that goes north to Central Asia and then west.

During the Taliban's six years in power, it preached that poppy production
and opium use were un-Islamic. But only in its sixth and final year in
control of Afghanistan did the Taliban actually suppress production.

It is widely believed that the Taliban benefited from an informal tax
system on the poppy products, and that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda
fighters fed their coffers from opium profits.

Recent unconfirmed Western intelligence reports say that al-Qaeda leaders
are cashing in stashed opium, trading it for gold and transporting the gold
to Sudan for safe keeping.

The local poppy farmer who asked not to be identified criticized this
year's eradication efforts.

He was promised $700 an acre not to grow poppy, he said, but he received
$168 per acre, with the rest going to a local warlord. While he collected
money to allow 42 acres to be destroyed in a nearby village called Kama, he
successfully harvested 35 acres in Ghani Khel, making tens of thousands of
dollars, he said.

The program appears unlikely to deter him or other poppy farmers.

He estimated that an acre sown with opium produces 20 times as much cash as
an acre sown with corn or wheat, although the labor-intensive nature of
collecting the poppy's sap reduces the margin somewhat.

Local farmers say they understand that opium and heroin cause problems in
other parts of the world, but they say the money is a key to survival here,
where the water tables have dropped because of a lack of rain over six
years. Poppies grow well in dry soil.

"I understand it's a crime," Said said. "But the water is gone and there is
no support from the government. So what are we to do?"

Many simply don't see it as wrong.

"I am not a drug dealer. I am a farmer," one man said.