U.N. CALLS AFGHAN EFFORT TO DESTROY POPPY A FAILURE

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

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 [gross domestic product]," said Hector Maletta,
a spokesman for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This
impoverished nation's gross domestic product for 1999, the latest estimate
available, was $21 billion.

By the late 1990s, Afghanistan was supplying 70 percent of the world's
opium. 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 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 is only a fraction of the
estimated $6,400 per acre of gross income a farmer can earn on poppy,
according to the report by the FAO.

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.

The 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.

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