OPIUM ERADICATION FAILS

'02 Crop Could Be Worth More Than $1 Billion for Nation's
Farmers

KABUL, Afghanistan - The new Afghan government has "largely failed" in
its 4-month-old effort to eradicate the opium poppy crop in
Afghanistan, which in recent years became the world's biggest producer
of the raw material for heroin, U.N. crop experts reported Sunday.

Their figures show the 2002 crop, close to the high levels of the late
1990s, could be worth more than $1 billion at the farm level in
Afghanistan.

"That's a big chunk of GDP," said Hector Maletta, a spokesman for the
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. This impoverished nation's
gross domestic product for 1999, the latest estimate available, was
put at $21 billion.

By the late 1990s, Afghanistan was supplying 70 percent of the world's
opium. Then, in 2000, the Taliban government banned poppy cultivation,
and U.N. and U.S. drug agencies determined that this led to an almost
total - 96 percent - reduction in acreage devoted to the crop in the
2001 growing season.

But the U.S.-led war that ousted the Taliban late last year prompted
Afghan farmers to plant poppy again over tens of thousands of acres.

In April, the interim government of President Hamid Karzai announced
an eradication program. Farmers would be compensated with $500 per
acre for destroyed poppy, the government said. That's only a fraction
of the estimated $6,400 per acre of gross income a farmer can earn on
poppy, according to the FAO report.

The government efforts failed despite pressure from the United States,
Western Europe and other countries that fear a sharp rise in the
supply of heroin. Only relatively small patches of opium in several
regions of Afghanistan were destroyed.

The great bulk of heroin produced from Afghan opium is used by addicts
in Europe. The British government, in particular, has pressured Karzai
to crack down, as did Iranian President Mohammad Khatami on a visit to
Kabul last week. Iran has an estimated 2 million opium and heroin addicts.

The U.N. poppy forecast came in a section of a joint report by the FAO
and the U.N. World Food Program assessing all Afghan crops and food
supplies.

"The Afghan Interim Administration banned opium production in January
2002 but by then most opium fields were already sown," the report
said. "The subsequent Poppy Eradication Program largely failed to
achieve its objectives."

It estimated that 225,000 acres of poppy were planted, and 150,000 to
175,000 acres have been or will be harvested.

"The government program had a very limited impact," the FAO's Maletta
told a news briefing, and eradication is "only a transient thing. It
can be replanted."

The Taliban prohibition had driven prices for Afghan opium up
astronomically, approaching $500 a pound, and the "farm gate" price
remains relatively high, Maletta said, at $160 to $180 a pound.
Farmers can produce some 35 pounds per acre of opium, a gum squeezed
and scraped from the flower pods.

The move back into poppy cultivation, which in recent years has
supported tens of thousands of Afghan farmers and farm laborers, has
hurt the domestic food supply, the U.N. report said. It said poppy is
estimated to have reduced the area of irrigated wheat by some 10 percent.

President Karzai, at a recent anti-drug conference in Kabul,
reiterated his government's commitment to eradicating the drug crop.

"We are determined, like hell, to fight the cultivation of poppy, to
work against the trafficking of drugs, and to destroy all forms of
this menace's cultivation and use and trafficking," he said.

The U.N. specialists predicted an even larger crop next year,
however.

"The returns and employment opportunities are high and the risks are
seen to be low given the large numbers of farmers involved and the
perceived improbability of prosecutions," they wrote.