UK'S NEW AFGHANISTAN PLAN: PAY FARMERS TO DITCH OPIUM

Troops May Target Drugs Factories As Part of Strategy to Combat Taliban

Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in
Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a
wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime
minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.

The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the
rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just
muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative
ideas on opium eradication.

Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a
system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural
policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government
is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the
World Bank.

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.

Mr Brown is expected to make a Commons statement on security and
development in Afghanistan in the next few weeks, and is likely to
highlight the strategic importance of the war against the Taliban in
his first annual foreign affairs speech at Mansion House on Monday.

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.

Critics in the British aid agencies claim that too little western aid
is set aside to provide alternative livelihoods for opium farmers in
Afghanistan, and comparatively too much going on building state
structures or funding public sector salaries.

Senior British officers believe the Afghan war remains largely
misunderstood in Britain, and say security is the precondition for
building alternatives to opium production. Lord Malloch-Brown
recently returned from Afghanistan to tell peers: "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."

But he 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 drug big 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 pointedly added 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.

The UK has provided $20m to an Afghan criminal justice taskforce that
has managed to secure only 400 convictions.

Some influential figures, including the former Foreign Office
permanent secretary Lord Jay, have become so despairing of the fight
that they are backing calls for opium to be produced legally and used
as medical morphine, but the idea appears to have been rejected.

Christian Aid has also called for an aid switch to improving
irrigation and water management; achieving food security through
expanded cereal production; credit facilities for farmers; and
building export markets for fruit and nuts.