OPIUM POPPY HARVEST DECLINES 6% IN AFGHANISTAN

Eradication Effort, Along With Drought and a Global Food Shortage That
Boosted the Price of Wheat, Cut Production of the Crop, Which Is Used
to Make Heroin.

After seven years of extraordinary expansion, Afghanistan's harvest of
poppies used to produce opium has declined by 6% from a record high in
2007, according to the annual opium survey by the United Nations
released Thursday.

The amount of land used to cultivate opium declined by 19%, to about
388,000 acres.

"We are finally seeing the results of years of effort of making some
areas completely free of opium harvesting," said Antonio Maria Costa,
the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime. Opium production is now concentrated in seven provinces in the
southwestern part of the country.

Afghanistan is responsible for providing 95% of the world's
opium-based drugs like heroin. The 6% decline is especially
significant because the harvest previously was growing by as much as
20% a year.

While the trend is raising hopes that the anti-drug efforts of the
Afghan government and its Western allies are succeeding, there is
evidence that powerful factions in the country like the Taliban are
also trying to squelch production. The insurgents are involved in
poppy production and want to drive up prices to raise cash for their
guerrilla warfare.

Costa's U.N. agency issues its annual report after gathering
information throughout the year via satellite photographs followed up
by surveillance on the ground.

This year's turnaround was also attributed to events unrelated to the
eradication effort, including a drought and global food shortage that
drove up the price of wheat, making it almost as profitable to farm as
opium.

"You produce wheat and that gets you a better income and you're not
afraid to be thrown in jail," said Costa, noting that the drought this
year also hurt both the wheat and poppy harvests.

Nowhere can this year's decrease be seen as dramatically as in
Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, which was ranked the No. 2
opium-cultivating province in last year's U.N. survey. This time, it
was certified opium-free.

Nangarhar, a fertile eastern province that borders Pakistan, was once
a patchwork of poppy fields, a quilt-like pattern of them easily
visible from the air.

Considered Afghanistan's breadbasket, it is bisected by the Kabul
River and by a large man-made irrigation canal with many
tributaries.

"You could grow poppies just about anywhere," said U.S. Air Force Lt.
Col. Paul Donovan, who just completed a stint as the head of the
military-civilian Provincial Reconstruction Team in Jalalabad, the
capital of Nangarhar.

He credited the drop in production to a variety of factors, including
authorities being attentive to the needs of farmers. At a recent
series of tribal councils, farmers complained of being short of
fertilizer and seed for winter wheat; both were swiftly provided.

Because farmers are often intimidated by the Taliban into producing a
poppy crop, "the counter-narcotics efforts merged with
counterinsurgency efforts," Donovan said.

In past years, the flourishing drug trade has bankrolled the Taliban
movement, which dominates many of the poppy-growing regions and uses
the revenue to procure arms and recruit foot soldiers.

The Taliban now has huge stockpiles of the illicit drug, and is
telling farmers not to grow more as a way of controlling the supply
and price.

"The glut is starting to hurt the Taliban, which has not been pushing
as hard on opium cultivation to keep the prices high," said Costa,
noting that U.N. surveyors have even seen signs posted on trees near
poppy fields discouraging planting.

Costa estimates that taxing poppy growth at 10% earns the Taliban
about $75 million a year, and it gains about $300 million through
opium production. Displaying a map of the country with the top half
blue and the bottom red, Costa explained to reporters in New York last
week that a majority of Afghanistan's 34 provinces are mostly
poppy-free, but the places in red where the crop is flourishing are
controlled by fewer but richer farmers whose poppies need to be eradicated.

In parts of Afghanistan's south, the longtime center of the
insurgency, cultivation is so pervasive that North Atlantic Treaty
Organization-led troops deployed there say their convoys routinely
pass by fields of poppies. Sometimes they even find themselves
crushing poppies underfoot on patrol.

"I didn't even know what they were when we first got here, and when
someone told me, I went 'Ohhh,' " said a Canadian patrol leader in
Kandahar province who did not want to be identified because he was not
authorized to speak about drug-eradication efforts. "I thought how
weird it is that money from all this is used to buy weapons to fight
against us, but we have to just walk by as if it's a normal thing to
see."

The international community, primarily the U.S. and British
governments, has poured $80 million a year into providing incentives
so that farmers in the north use their fields for other crops, Costa
said.