AFGHAN FARMERS CLING TO OPIUM FOR SURVIVAL

By Kurt Schork

LASHKARGHA, Afghanistan, Nov 27 (Reuters) Seeds for half the world's
1998 opium harvest are already germinating in the fields of Afghanistan
despite pledges by the country's Taleban authorities to eradicate opium
poppy cultivation.

For the moment, at least, farmers in Helmand province in southwestern
Afghanistan the country's richest opiumgrowing area are not as
worried about a government ban on their crop as they are that birds will
eat the poppy seeds they have just planted.

Strips of white plastic tied to stakes flutter in a cool breeze along the
perimeter of Haji Agha Mohamed's two small plots outside LashkarGha.

And, just in case the pennants are not enough to frighten the birds away,
he has assigned two of his younger sons to act as human scarecrows by
scampering about the fields.

``We have sown the seeds. There is nothing to do over the winter except to
protect the crop,'' said the 60yearold farmer.

If all goes well, Haji Agha and members of his family will move through the
field next June scarring ripe opium bulbs with special knives and scraping
off the gum which oozes out.

The raw opium will then be sold to local traders and smuggled over a
labyrinth of trails into neighbouring Pakistan, Iran and Turkmenistan by
camel, donkey, truck and on foot.

Dried and refined into heroin in laboratories along the way, most of the
product will end up in Europe, the United States or Pakistan, where there
is a large addict population.

A small tenant farmer with 23 dependants, Haji Agha cleared $5,000 on his
1997 opium crop a good living in a country where the average per capita
income is $100 annually. As a result, he planted even more land in opium
poppy for next year.

The United Nations' new drug czar, Pino Arlacchi, whose reputation as a
crime fighter springs from successful battles against the mafia in his
native Italy, plans to stamp out opium production in Afghanistan over five
years, and around the world in 10.

``In Afghanistan it is a matter of helping the Taleban do something they
want to do anyway as strict Moslems,'' Arlacchi, director of the U.N.
International Drug Control Programme, told reporters during a visit to
Helmand this week.

``The key is to mobilise resources from the international community to
provide farmers with the irrigation, seed, fertiliser and machinery they
need to raise alternative crops.''

Foreign reluctance to invest in a country still divided and at war, grave
reservations about the Taleban's human rights record and resistance from
wellentrenched criminal elements make Arlacchi's plan a long shot at best.

Anxious to convert sceptics, Arlacchi points out that Helmand was once
Afghanistan's breadbasket, by virtue of a massive irrigation system built
by the United States in the 1960s. Thanks to the Cold War, what had been
desert suddenly sprouted with wheat, cotton, vegetables and fruit.

While opium poppy was always grown in Helmand and elsewhere in Afghanistan,
U.N. officials say it was a minor crop until war and drought disrupted
supplies from the Golden Triangle in southeast Asia in the 1970s.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, anticommunist
mujahideen fighters turned to opium cultivation and heroin production to
help finance their holy Islamic war.

In Helmand, neglect and nearly two decades of war first against the
Russians and then among Afghan factions have left the once magnificent
irrigation system in a shambles.

The main Bughra Canal is clogged with silt and many of its sluice gates are
damaged and inoperative, as are subsidiary canals and ditches distributing
water to individual plots.

The corps of engineers and technicians who once managed the province's
intricate water system no longer exists.

But with the Taleban ruling 80 percent of Afghanistan's land area and
disposed to ban opium as a matter of Islamic principle, Arlacchi hopes to
make a prohibition on poppy cultivation practical by providing farmers with
an economic carrot.

Haji Agha is ready. ``Repairing our irrigation system is the main thing
because right now it is dry in the summer and I can only grow one crop,''
he explained.

``With water and better seed and some machines and fertiliser, I could
plant two crops every year. I would grow wheat or cotton or maize, not
opium. I could plant more land and make more money with less work.''