BROWN GOES TO WAR ON AFGHAN HEROIN

A RADICAL scheme to bump up the
price of legal crops in Afghanistan to help deter farmers from
producing heroin is being planned by Gordon Brown.

The "big drug men", including the financiers and shippers, would also
be targeted with travel bans and their bank accounts frozen as part of
the fight against the Taliban.

The Prime Minister will highlight the conflict in Afghanistan in his
first annual foreign affairs speech at the Mansion House in London
tomorrow.

The Government appears to have rejected suggestions that opium
production be legalised and sold as morphine.

Instead, Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown revealed the
Government's plans to introduce a system of payments similar to the
Common Agricultural Policy in comments to the House of Lords on his
return from Afghanistan.

He told peers that the rise in opium production in Afghanistan meant
Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with
more imaginative ideas on ending opium production.

"The Department of International Development is looking at whether we
can put on a more formal and structured long-term basis what one would
controversially describe as an Afghan equivalent of a CAP, with
subsidised purchase of legal crops to make returns more like those
from poppy," said Malloch-Brown.

The Government has joined the World Bank in a research project looking
a possible economic incentives.

Malloch-Brown added: "We have to do a much better job of not targeting
the farmers, the producers whose hearts and minds we are trying to win
in the counter-insurgency effort. We have to target the industry above
that - the financiers, the shippers, the big drug men who are
benefiting from the production.

"We know who they are and the government of Afghanistan know who they
are. A system banning them from travel, listing them and freezing
their bank accounts, hitting at the industry's infrastructure, strikes
me as an area in which more can be done."

He said that only the US favoured aerial spraying of opium
crops.

Illegal Afghan opium was selling for as much as $125 per kilo in 2006.
The UN said the area under cultivation rose this year from 165,000 to
193,000 hectares and the harvest rose from 6,100 to 8,200 tonnes.

Opium production is heavily concentrated in areas of insecurity, with
the British area of responsibility in Helmand now the world's biggest
source of illicit drugs.

British and allied forces are also looking at destroying drug
factories inside Afghanistan, and a much better-targeted drive against
the big traffickers responsible for 90% of the opium which reaches the
West.

The focus on Afghanistan comes as British troop levels there are now
higher than in Iraq. There are approximately 7,700 British troops in
Afghanistan, compared with around 5,000 in Iraq.