DRUG CROP ERADICATION FAILS, UN REPORT SAYS

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 has become 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. The nation's gross domestic product
(GDP) 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 a 96 percent
reduction in acreage devoted to the crop in 2001.

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

In April, the interim government of President Hamid Karzai announced an
eradication program. Farmers would be compensated with $500 per acre for
destroyed poppy, a fraction of the estimated $6,400 per acre grossed on
poppy crops.

The great bulk of heroin produced from Afghan opium is used in Europe.

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

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

The move back into poppy cultivation has hurt the domestic food supply, the
U.N. report said.

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