OPIUM OUTPUT IS SOARING

Taliban Rulers Gone, Afghans Plant Again

ROME -- Afghanistan's opium production has dramatically increased this year
due to U.S.-led military strikes that toppled the Taliban rulers and enabled
widespread poppy planting, the head of the United Nations' drug agency said
Friday.

Opium output in Afghanistan this year is expected to be 3,400 tons. In 2001,
185 tons were produced when the Taliban rulers cracked down on poppy
cultivation.

The shift was because "one regime was on the run in the autumn of last year
while the new government was not even on the radar screen," said Antonio
Maria Costa, the agency's executive director.

The forecast is made in a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

But the 2002 estimate remains 25 percent lower than the record output in
1999, when Afghanistan was providing about 70 percent of the world's opium.

The new government under President Hamid Karzai banned the cultivation,
processing, trafficking and consumption of opiates, but it has appeared
unable to enforce the ban.

Farmers were promised $350 per acre for not growing poppies, but there have
been protests, some of them violent, in several southern towns over
compensation payments.

Last month, the government reasserted the ban on poppy planting, but many
farmers have defied it. With the country's economy devastated by war and
drought, the attraction of the lucrative crop is huge.

Prices shot up tenfold when the Taliban's 2001 crackdown pushed down opium
stocks, further encouraging farmers to sow the 2002 crop, Costa said.