U.S. SEEDS NEW CROPS TO SUPPLANT AFGHAN POPPIES

QALAI BOST VILLAGE, Afghanistan -- The Obama administration is
overhauling its strategy for eliminating Afghanistan's flourishing
drug trade, a key source of funds for the Taliban. Its plan hinges on
persuading farmers like Mohammed Walid to grow something other than
poppies.

Mr. Walid's tidy fields here in southern Afghanistan once were full of
poppy bulbs, the core ingredient in opium. He replaced the poppy with
wheat and corn after receiving free seed from a U.S. government
program, starting about two years ago. Today, he grows enough of both
crops to feed his family and sell the remainder at a nearby bazaar.

"I tell my friends that I've gone into a different business," he says,
looking out at his farm. "It's the same fields, but everything else
has changed."

Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the
eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other
ways of earning a living.

The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan
food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of
new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed
and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as
much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.

"We're trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away
from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and
poverty," says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International
Development official leading the drive. "The idea is to make it easier
for farmers to make the right choice."

Still, building a viable alternative to Afghanistan's opium economy
will be challenging. Corn and wheat can be less profitable than opium.
Taliban fighters, who are closely allied with the traffickers, have
threatened farmers who drop poppies for other crops. When U.S.
officials opened a new distribution center for the seed program last
year, Taliban militants promptly rocketed it.

The new U.S. push comes alongside a stepped-up military effort to
crack down on Afghanistan's drug lords. A Senate Foreign Relations
Committee report this week disclosed that the Pentagon had begun
hunting 50 drug traffickers suspected of ties to the Taliban. The
military is trying to capture or kill each of the men, according to
the report.

On Thursday, U.S. aircraft and missiles pounded Taliban mountainside
positions around Dahaneh, in Helmand province, the heart of
Afghanistan's drug trade, according to the Associated Press.

Senior Obama administration officials say bluntly that earlier U.S.
efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppy fields have failed. The Bush
administration initially envisioned spraying herbicide on the poppies
from planes or tractors, but that was vetoed by the Afghan government.
Instead, Washington paid American contractors and Afghan security
personnel hundreds of millions of dollars to slash and burn individual
poppy fields.

The eradication effort has been widely unpopular in Afghanistan and
hasn't discernibly hurt the drug industry here. Afghanistan accounted
for 12% of the world's opium production in 2001, according to the
United Nations. By 2008, it accounted for 93%.

Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan
and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington late last month that the
U.S. "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars" on eradication. "All we
did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into
the hands of the Taliban."

MichA"le Flournoy, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for
policy, said in a recent interview that the U.S. was focusing on crop
substitution as a way of taking advantage of Afghanistan's fertile
soil and long history of growing fruit, wheat and other exportable
crops.

U.S. officials note that a similar USAID program in eastern Nangarhar
province has helped that region go poppy-free. According to U.N.
figures, Nangarhar had 18,731 hectares, or about 46,000 acres, of
poppy fields in 2007. In 2008, it had none.

U.S. and Afghan officials also argue that the plunging price of opium
- -- which has dropped from $225 per kilogram of dried opium in January
2005 to $75 per kilo in April -- means many farmers could make more
money selling wheat or corn.

"The farmers don't get rich on poppy," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
the top American commander in Afghanistan, in a recent interview. "If
you can protect the farmer and give him the ability to get to market
he's going to do fine with other crops."

It's easy for poppy farmers to earn a living: Opium traffickers show
up at their farms and pay cash for entire harvests. Wheat and corn
farmers have to process and store their crops, drive the harvest to
the nearest market, and find their own buyers. Local corn and wheat
prices have fluctuated wildly in recent months, whipsawing many farmers.

Mr. Walid says converting his fields to corn and wheat has required
significant expenditures on equipment, field laborers, and fertilizer.
The current price for corn is so low that he is barely covering his
costs, he says.

Mr. Walid owns his own tractor, so he can ferry crops to nearby towns.
But most of his neighbors have no way of bringing their wares to the
markets, he says, adding "With poppy, the buyers come to you."

Mr. Donohoe of USAID sees the antidrug push in both economic and moral
terms. "The narcotics industry has completely distorted the local
economy," he says.

Mr. Donohoe travels around Helmand province with a notebook full of
statistics detailing the potential financial benefits of converting
farms to corn and wheat from poppy. At the same time, he says, his
work is fueled by the knowledge that drug proceeds help fund an
insurgency that is regularly killing U.S. and British soldiers
stationed at his small base in nearby Lashkar Gah. "I want to see the
drug trade here go down to zero," he says flatly.

Helmand long grew more wheat than any other part of Afghanistan. The
widespread cultivation of poppy fields is a relatively recent
innovation, and Mr. Donohoe believes the change can be reversed. "The
idea that farmers here don't know how to grow wheat is absurd," he
says. "They did it for decades."

Still, the extra money in this year's $300 million effort may not be
enough to turn the tide in Helmand, where Afghanistan's drug trade has
deep roots. In Lashkar Gah, Helmand's most populous city, many of the
biggest houses belong to narco-traffickers and poppy farmers.

For many farmers, the question of what to grow comes down to cold
economics. According to a recent U.N. report, the average poppy farmer
in southern Afghanistan earned $6,194 in 2008. Farmers in the south
who grew other crops earned just $3,382. The U.N. and U.S. estimate
that $500 million of opium is grown each year in Helmand alone.

Mr. Walid supports 23 people with his agricultural earnings. Corn and
wheat prices are so low he will have to plow over his fields and
replace them with poppy if market conditions don't improve: "I won't
have a choice," he says.

As he spoke, he took a small bag of hashish and a thin box of rolling
paper out of his front pocket and began making himself a cigarette.

"For later," he said, winking.