OPIUM POPPY FIRMLY ROOTED IN AFGHAN SOIL

Economic Realities All But Guarantee That Farmers Will Keep Drug Trade Alive

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The elderly sharecropper with an Old Testament
beard and dusty clothing scampers over his meticulously cultivated field
and says he knows the poppies growing at his feet are killing people.

''It's not my fault,'' says Abdul Ghafer, 70, in half-hearted denial.

When the poppies bloom in three to four months, Ghafer will milk the
hardened capsule within each blossom. The white liquid it produces will be
rendered into opium, which some distant laboratory will process into heroin
for addicts, primarily in Europe.

Over the years, such small-scale, backyard cultivation has multiplied a
thousandfold in Afghanistan, producing as much as 5,000 metric tons of
opium in peak years, or three-fourths of the world's supply. Not even a
crackdown by the fundamentalist Taliban regime could end the lucrative
business.

Now, with the war-torn country in chaos, economic realities make it almost
impossible for Afghanistan's struggling government, or even international
agencies, to subsidize other crops and thus wean Ghafer and other farmers
off a crop that can provide an income many times that earned by the average
Afghan.

Since the Taliban fled Kandahar and neighboring provinces last year, poor
farmers such as Ghafer have rushed to resume cultivation in small plots.
This year, Ghafer will pocket as much as $16,000 -- in a country where the
per capita gross domestic product is $800.

Payday is not far off. In his garden, the poppies, nurtured by well water
pumped into small furrows, already are sprouting lettuce-like leaves
through the rich, dark soil. The field, neatly divided into 9-by-12-foot
plots and surrounded by high walls, lies within the city limits, only a few
miles from the palace of the newly installed governor of Kandahar province,
Gul Agha Shirzai.

The money from poppies, Ghafer says, is too good to pass up. ''If the
government helps, pays us the money, we will not grow any more poppies,''
he says as he balances atop an irrigation channel bisecting his poppy
garden. ''We know that it's not good for the people.''

Ghafer is talking about incentives -- cash payouts to turn farmers away
from lucrative poppy production. But for the financially strapped interim
government of Hamid Karzai, subsidies are not a priority in the struggle to
rebuild a nation after 23 years of war.

The Taliban didn't restrict the cultivation of the narcotic plant in the
first years of its regime, which began here in 1994. But in 2000, Taliban
leader Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy production as un-Islamic. In
response, the United States gave the Taliban $43 million in aid last May
for its successful campaign to eradicate the poppy crop.

Even after the Taliban decree, poppy growing continued sporadically. Local
authorities say that although the ban discouraged a great number of poppy
farmers who feared the Taliban's reputation for harsh punishments, it was
never actively enforced. Local drug kingpins, such as Hadji Bashir of the
nearby village of Maiwand, remained key Taliban collaborators and money
suppliers. Local farmers say they continued to grow the plant secretly.

As for Bashir, he showed up at a U.S. military base in Kandahar earlier
this month saying he had important information. After he was questioned, he
was released. He promised to stop dealing drugs.

On Jan. 16, with the Taliban on the run and international pressure building
to prevent the re-emergence of the drug trade, Karzai renewed the ban on
poppy growing. ''Violators will be dealt with severely,'' read his decree.
It was issued just days before the conference Jan. 21-22 in Tokyo at which
major aid donors pledged $4.5 billion over five years to help rebuild the
country.

But farmers here and in neighboring Helmand province, where poppy growing
is even more important to the economy, are shrugging off the new
government's decree. Nangarhar province in far eastern Afghanistan is
another poppy stronghold.

''I'm not worried about that (decree),'' Ghafer says. ''I would tell
(Karzai): 'This is my job, this is what I do.' '' He planted poppy seeds
right after the Taliban fled Kandahar in December.

Even so, he is no fool. Behind the plot's high walls, his poppy crop is
hidden among turnip, potato and onion plants. In a city where walled
compounds are the norm, his garden is unobtrusive and, from the inside,
even picturesque. With its decaying, mud-covered walls, brick outbuilding
and leafy scattering of apple and orange trees, it has all the trappings of
a peaceful sanctuary from the bedlam of Afghanistan's second-largest city.

''I enjoy walking around and working. It's a good place,'' Ghafer says.
''It's good for my health.''

It also is lucrative, which is why these plots can be found throughout the
region. Six miles outside Kandahar, a discreet 200 yards off the highway
that leads northwest to Herat, a cluster of farmers gathers. The farmers --
men who each own maybe an acre of farmland -- poke with their fingers
through the freshly watered earth of one field to uncover tiny poppy
sprouts planted just days before.

'We need to eat'

''I know that people are killed by this,'' says farmer Ali Jan, 30, who
lives nearby with his wife and eight children. ''But unfortunately we are
poor and we need to make money from this. We need to eat. We need to buy
clothes to wear and other things.''

The farmers say they are eager to hear whether the Karzai government will
offer incentives, and they promise to accept them. With international
funding pledged just a week ago, there has been no public discussion of
incentives to back up the new ban.

The United Nations is just re-establishing its presence in Kabul. It says
it is still developing plans to curtail poppy cultivation. Among the ideas
being floated to deal with this year's crop, says U.N. Office for Drug
Control and Crime Prevention spokesman Kemal Kurspahic: using international
funds to buy the crop when it is harvested in March and setting up
drug-control offices in key areas.

If subsidies are forthcoming, ''we will make gardens and places for
planting fruit trees and also grow wheat,'' Jan says.

Government and United Nations authorities have conceded that a simple ban
on poppy growing, even with efforts to enforce it, will not cure the
problem. As quickly as the Karzai decree was issued, the Vienna-based U.N.
Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention said incentives to discourage
poppy growing were absolutely essential.

''The interim administration (of Afghanistan) needs to provide immediate
assistance to farmers as a first step in sustainable alternative
development, with commercial crops replacing opium poppy as the source of
farmers' livelihoods,'' the agency said.

Even the concept of incentives remains open to debate within the Afghan
leadership. In the Kandahar provincial government of Gul Agha, which would
likely be the funnel for any incentives, adviser Yousuf Pashtun says he
would argue against cash subsidies. Instead, Pashtun says, he would urge
government assistance in making irrigation more affordable for small farmers.

At the U.N. World Food Program office in Kandahar, program officer Sikender
Hyatt Khan says the issue boils down to income. These are poor families who
are simply trying to survive.

''Unless we can provide them something to survive on, they will continue to
grow it,'' Khan says.

Famous for orchards

This region has long been a major agricultural center, but poppies weren't
always the main crop. For centuries, Kandahar and the surrounding region
were famous for fruit: figs, peaches, mulberries, melons, grapes and
pomegranates. Pakistani author and journalist Ahmed Rashid, in his writings
about Afghanistan, says fruits grown here were traded as far away as
Calcutta and Delhi in India.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, fighting between Russian
troops and mujahedin warriors destroyed the complex irrigation systems that
once watered the orchards. Soviet troops tore down the trees and
obliterated the water channels to eliminate places where guerrillas could
take cover.

The fields were heavily mined. Ghafer says he lost two sons, ages 20 and
16, to a land-mine explosion while they worked one of his fields outside
the city in 1992. Farming was further crippled by a devastating drought
that now appears to be entering its fourth year.

The United Nations has an aggressive mine-removal program underway
throughout Afghanistan, but it could take five to 10 years merely to rid
major cities of the explosives.

Various relief agencies such as Mercy Corps and CARE have individual
programs to repair water channels and canals, but here too much remains to
be done.

The mujahedin warlords in the 1980s and then the Taliban in the 1990s
profited from money made in the smuggling and distribution of opium.

Before it issued its ban, the Taliban levied an Islamic tax called a zakat
on all dealers moving opium, Rashid says. The Taliban's take was up to 20%
of the value of the raw shipment, before it left the country to be
processed for sale.

Many farmers are now locked into a cycle of poppy production. They were
advanced cash by drug dealers and need to produce the crop to pay the money
back.

The plant is labor- and water-intensive. It must be carefully spaced from
other vegetation to give the flowers room to grow. And it requires constant
irrigation.

Harvesting the milky substance extracted from the immature seeds of the
flower is back-breaking, time-consuming work in the summer heat. The flower
capsules must be lanced. Harvesters then use their fingers to squeeze out
the gooey white substance inside, a process repeated daily until the flower
yields no more liquid.

The raw opium, which gels into a gum-like substance, is molded into a cake
called tor for sale to the dealers. Producing it often means hiring a dozen
or more additional hands to work a 1-acre parcel.

It's tough work, but the region's rich soil is ideal for this crop.

''It's soft (and) damp and it doesn't have salt in it,'' says Ghafer,
squatting down and breaking apart a clump of dirt with his hands. ''The
land is good.'' He and the others farmers annually produce 50 to 60 pounds
of raw opium from each small patch of land.

Ghafer says his primary alternative would be wheat. The income would be a
fraction of what he is paid for his poppy harvest, barely enough to keep
his family alive, he says. By some estimates, farmers earn eight times as
much money by growing poppies rather than traditional crops such as wheat.

Growing poppies secretly

Out in the fields west of Kandahar, farmer Ali Jan says that if Karzai
tries to enforce his decree without offering incentives to farmers, he and
others will simply do what they did during the Taliban restriction: grow
poppies secretly in their homes.

Standing with him and other farmers in the poppy fields is Mohammad Akbar,
35, whose business is to buy the cakes of tor each season and transport
them northwest to Herat.

There, Akbar says, he sells them to men who he says work for the local
governor, Ismail Khan, like Gul Agha a warlord who moved in to reclaim a
region once under Taliban control.

From Herat, packets of the raw material are taken to heroin-processing
centers near the border with Iran.

If subsidies for the farmers come through and Karzai is successful in
stemming production, it would put Akbar out of a job. There would be no
subsidies for the drug runners. He shrugs.

''I would leave this business,'' he says, ''and start selling cars.''