KANSAS NATIVE AT CROSSROADS OF DRUG WAR, TERRORISM

For A Decade, Tom Brown Has Worked In Central Asia Fighting Opium Poppy
Production

Except for some rocks, the roadway looked the same as it did earlier in the
day when Tom Brown left to meet with farmers.

The rocks had been painted warning-light red while he was gone. Afghan
government officials had determined that the road ran straight through a
minefield.

"We kind of all shut up" while finding a detour, Brown recounted earlier
this week from his home in Wichita's College Hill neighborhood.

Brown is an agricultural consultant, a common enough job in south-central
Kansas. But the farmers he works with are half a world away, and they grow a
crop not commonly seen on the prairie: opium poppy.

Trying to persuade Afghan farmers to switch from opium to other crops puts
Brown at the intersection of the war on terrorism and the war on drugs.

Not every day is as harrowing as the day he drove through a minefield. But
Afghanistan can be like that, he said - big risks, taken in hopes of making
the war-torn land a better place.

Brown, 42, is a Kansas native and Kansas State University graduate. He had
been living and working in neighboring Pakistan for 10 years with his wife,
Gina, a Wichita native. They came back to Kansas with their three children
shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks made things "dicey" for foreigners, he
said. He has been to Afghanistan twice, for a total of 10 weeks, since a
U.S.-backed military drive deposed the Taliban there last year.

Afghanistan, which in the past has supplied three-quarters of the world's
opium, could see a record poppy crop this year, according to a United
Nations report.

The government, led by pro-American Hamid Karzai, condemns the trade, but it
is too weak to do much to stop it.

From a farmer's standpoint, growing poppies makes good business sense,
especially when drought makes other crops difficult to grow, Brown said.

His job with the Central Asia Development Group, a newly formed
non-governmental organization, is to show farmers that other crops, such as
peas, lentils and cotton, are preferable to poppies.

"The opium buyers are the only people encouraging these farmers to grow
anything," he said. His organization offers assistance to farmers who want
to grow other crops.

But, per acre, poppies still rake in more than 10 times as much money as
other crops, even after factoring in government payments for farmers not to
grow poppies.

If other buyers convince farmers in one part of Afghanistan to stop planting
poppies, opium traders will find farmers elsewhere, he said.

And if governments make attractive financial offers, then the buyers will
sweeten theirs. "You have richer peasants, but they're still growing
poppies," he said.

Poppies are highly labor-intensive, so farmers plant them on less land than
they would use for other crops. That makes acre-to-acre comparisons
misleading, he said.

Also, just because something makes more money doesn't mean it's
automatically what someone's going to do, he said.

"These farmers know what their crop is used for," he said. "They're willing
to produce other things."

Being stopped by bandits at gunpoint is nerve-racking the first few times it
happens, Brown said. But after a while, you learn how to handle it.

"There's about five seconds when it's really scary," he said. "Then they
realize you're not going to shoot back, and the negotiations begin."

Brown said he's helped by his ties to Pakistan and ability to speak Pashto,
the language of Afghanistan's largest ethnic group. He also said he's driven
by belief that poppy-growing will fade from Afghanistan as the country
recovers from a quarter-century nightmare.

"We have to take away the excuse that there's nothing else" worth growing
but poppies, he said.