Afghanistan Agrees to Stem Opium Poppy Crop

Nation's blooms make half the world's heroin

By Barbara Crosette
New York Times

United Nations

The director of the United Nations antinarcotics organization said
yesterday that the Taliban movement that controls most of Afghanistan has
agreed to enforce: a ban on opium poppy production and smuggling with the
help of international crimefighting organizations.

The official, Undersecretary General Pino Arlacchi, said in an interview
that the agreement with the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul,
Afghanistan's capital, in September 1996, took six months to negotiate.

Only last month, Arlacchi, an Italian expert on the Mafia who became
executive director this year of the U.N. International Drug Control
Program, described himself as "very worried" that poppy production had
increased since the Taliban took power.

But yesterday, he described the new agreement as "a major breakthrough,"
doubly important because it comes as the next season's crop is about to be
sown.

"We are talking about half the heroin in the world," he said.

Arlacchi said a memorandum submitted this week to his office in Kabul
"opened the door to direct monitoring of the ban" for the first time. He
said he will return to Afghanistan from U.N. headquarters in New York next
month to ask for permission to put a surveillance network into 42 districts
where poppies are grown.

As a result of the agreement, the United Nations, using the BBC's
foreignlanguage services, plans to begin broadcastsin Pushto,
Afghanistan's native language, next week to tell farmers of the ban.
Because the planting season is about to begin, international monitors
should be able to determine within a matter of months whether the Taliban
movement has indeed begun to eliminate or to reduce crops.

The drug control agency has devised a program that would introduce new
crops that could substitute for opium poppies extend irrigation systems,
build a few factories and pay for police training and enforcement. The cost
is about $35 million a year over five to 10 years.

U.N. officials have been struggling for year to devise policies for dealing
with the Taliban movement, with agencies uarreling over how much
Afghanistan's new rulers should be isolated because of heir harsh Islamic
strictures, particularly their repression of women.

But Arlacchi said yesterday that for his agency, this is a political
question beyond its domain. "We are dealing with drugs,' he said, "and
Afghanistan is in the central position on our map."

In September, Arlacchi said opium production in Afghanistan had increased
25 percent, to 2,800 tons. About half the world's heroin is derived from
Afghan opium.

The Taliban movement banned the production and consumption of marijuana and
its derivative hashish, as well as heroin, several months ago, but it left
the question of the poppy harvest unresolved.

Arlacchi calculates that 1 million Afghans living in poppy growing areas
earn about $100 million from the poppy crop. That would break down to about
$500 for a typical family of five.

"The farmers won't lose much," he said. "An appropriate alternative crop
could earn them two or three times that much.~