REFORM'S HARVEST: PLANTING RICE, CORN INSTEAD OF POPPIES

MUONG XEN, Vietnam -- Up, way up, tucked into the wild green yonder of
Vietnam, that's where the opium grows best.

Ethnic Hmong farmers have been growing opium poppies in these
limestone mountains for hundreds of years, making medicinal opium for
themselves, then selling or bartering the rest. Normally the farmers
would have just finished the spring harvest about now, clearing an
acre of poppies here, a half-acre there.

Officials claim success

But this year -- if you believe the government -- there was not a
single poppy grown here along the border with Laos. Police and
drug-control officials give the credit to a vigorous campaign of
eradication and crop replacement in the upper reaches and rocky
ramparts of Nghe An province.

"Our way of attacking heroin is prevention," said police Col. Bui Xuan
Bien, a director of the Vietnam National Drug Control Committee. "We
want to stop the need, then stop the supply. In the end, I think we'll
succeed."

The eradication efforts are part of Hanoi's response to a recent
alarming rise in the use and trafficking of hard drugs in Vietnam.
Opium, which is made from poppies and usually smoked, has long been
known colloquially as com den, or black rice, for its color and sticky
consistency. But new words for modern problems also are appearing in
the Vietnamese language, words like "heroin" and "mafia."

A growing generation of young heroin addicts is appearing, too, along
with harsh new drug laws that included the death penalty for
trafficking. Nineteen people have been executed by firing squads
already this year, nine of them in Nghe An alone. Penalties are so
swift and severe that a heroin smuggler being chased by police here
chose to blow himself up with a grenade rather than be taken alive.

Nghe An accounts for nearly 40 percent of the opium seized in the
entire country, and 30 percent of the heroin. A former Interpol agent
working with the Vietnamese government says most of the opium is being
grown in Laos, where drug laws and border controls are virtually
non-existent. It comes into Nghe An along the rivers, jungle paths and
dirt roads that once made up the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Much of the international heroin traffic -- heroin is refined opium,
with about 10 times the kick -- originates in Burma and Thailand,
moves through Laos and then passes through Vietnam on its way to
Australia, China, Japan and North America.

"The opium is very high purity, 90 percent or more," says Jens
Hannibal, head of the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) in
Vietnam. "It has led to a number of overdoses in Australia. The
addicts in Sydney and Melbourne aren't used to that purity."

There is no evidence yet of heroin being produced in Vietnam -- that's
more likely done in Burma and Thailand -- but the mountainous
district of Ky Son, one of Vietnam's poorest areas, has been the
nation's most prolific opium-producing area.

Five years ago, Ky Son had 7,000 acres planted in poppies, which
produced nine tons of opium. Nguyen Van Hanh, deputy director for drug
control in Nghe An, now contends that the acreage has dropped to zero.
Maybe a few undiscovered pockets, he says, but nothing
appreciable.

The national government, along with a UNDCP pilot project in Ky Son,
has convinced the farmers -- most of them members of the Hmong and
Black Thai ethnic groups -- to tear out their poppies and replace them
with corn, potatoes, plum trees, cattle barns and pig pens.

Economics of replacement

"There's no magic replacement crop," says Leik Boonwaat, the chief
technical adviser for the Ky Son project. "We have to offer the
farmers a combination of things, a package that will add up to more
than what they would make from an illegal crop of opium poppies."

The arithmetic and economics of opium are simple. A typical farmer
with one acre in poppies will bring in a harvest worth $400 from the
highly secret and sophisticated drug traders. That's more than twice
the average per capita income in rural Vietnam.

Those numbers represented the household economy of Ly Pa Cho, head of
the commune of Muong Long, population 4,169, elevation 4,000 feet. Cho
and his constituents are ethnic Hmong, a clannish people who live in
the mountain terraces along the Laotian border and are known to have
produced some of the world's purest opium.

"Of course I grew opium; everybody in the commune did," said Cho, a
42-year-old father of eight. "But the government came to us in 1996
and told us we couldn't grow opium anymore. We had nothing to say
about it. When the government says you can't, you can't."

Cho's high-altitude farm now consists of 10 cows, some pigs and
chickens, a small rice paddy and 60 plum trees. With good management,
favorable weather and fair market prices, Cho can make more from this
farm than he did from poppies.

The UNDCP project started in May 1996, and the first overtures were
new roads, TV relay stations, health clinics and water taps, plus
supplies of cooking oil, salt and medicine. "Winning the hearts and
minds of the rural people was the first step," says Boonwaat.

The program also delivered a hardy type of Dutch potato that was
designed to do well in the soil and climate of Ky Son's mountains.
There were fruit trees, hives of honeybees, improved strains of corn
and beans. A pair of super-sized breeder hogs named Sylvester and
Arnold were imported from the United States. A specialist from the
Netherlands arrived to cure an outbreak of cholera that killed half
the hogs in the district. And when 80 percent of the chickens died
recently, a team of Australian veterinarians was rushed in.

All these cows, pigs, trees and vets carry a substantial cost. The
Vietnamese state budget allocated 40 billion dong ($2.9 million) for
drug control measures last year, and about $218,000 will go toward
crop replacement this year. In addition, the UNDCP program in Ky Son
has a four-year budget of $3.8 million.

A local legend in these majestic highlands says that an ancient
mountain king once had two daughters. One found a handsome husband,
but the other daughter smelled so bad that no one wanted her. The
second daughter was angry and bitter about the men who spurned her,
and when she died her vagina sent forth a flower so beautiful and
intoxicating that no man could resist it. That flower, of course, was
the opium poppy.

Is program sustainable?

Whether the farmers here can continue to resist the allure of growing
poppies remains to be seen. One U.N. crop-replacement program in
Thailand has continued for 24 years. Will the Vietnamese farmers stay
with their plums, pigs and potatoes if and when the government and
U.N. programs fold their tents and leave?

"There's always that worry -- the sustainability," says Boonwaat.
"Growing opium poppies is easy money, there's too much profit, and
replanting may prove to be too tempting."