NO POPPIES FOR OPIUM, U.N. CONTROL TEAM SAYS

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- U.N. drug-control officers said the Taliban
religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan
- -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation in
July.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks
searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so
few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan
this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said
Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and
Pakistan.

He laid out photographs of vast fields cultivated with wheat alongside
pictures of the same sites taken in 2000 -- a sea of blood-red poppies.

The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would
make its own estimate of the poppy crop. "We do not think by any stretch of
the imagination that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been eliminated.
But we, like the rest of the world, welcome positive news."

No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of security
concerns stemming from the presence of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75
percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said.

Opium -- the milky substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted
into heroin and sold in Europe and North America.

The 2000 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations
said -- more than all other countries combined, including the "Golden
Triangle," where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing
before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict
making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of
Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed
farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. team members, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed
Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others
- -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan
last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of
the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there,
Frahi said. The rest -- about 175,000 acres -- was clean.

"We have to look at the situation with careful optimism," said Sandro Tucci
of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that,
as a result, there hasn't been any production of opium -- but that
officials would keep checking.

Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey was done
now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the poppies to have been
harvested already.

The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands under
Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile, have not
traditionally been poppy-growing areas and farmers are struggling to raise
any crops at all because of severe drought. The rest of the land held by
the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where poppies could not grow.

Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of
Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in fields
where they once grew poppies.

"It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were filled
with poppies and this year there is wheat," he said.

But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world's poorest countries,
shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.

Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with his three
brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the land brought
him $1,100.

This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and cattle
feed he planted on the entire parcel.

Rehman said he never considered defying the ban. "The Taliban were
patrolling all the time," he said.