AFGHAN FARMERS THREATENING TO REPLANT OPIUM POPPIES

Eradication Efforts Hindered by Disputes Over Compensation

CHAPARHAR, Afghanistan -- Three months ago, a truckload of government
workers arrived at Malik Ziauddin's village, accompanied by armed guards.
Wielding sticks and sickles, they beat and chopped at his prized crop until
only useless green pulp was left.

Ziauddin, a sunburned 65-year-old farmer, watched with mingled regret and
anticipation. Like thousands of other farmers who grow opium poppies in
Afghanistan, he had been promised $350 in cash for each fifteenth of an
acre that was destroyed -- far less than drug smugglers normally paid, but
still a tempting deal.

By last week, however, none of the money had reached the poppy farmers in
Ziauddin's village, parched by four years of drought that thirstier crops
such as wheat cannot withstand. The villagers vowed angrily that if they
are not paid soon, they will start growing poppies again.

"We know poppy causes problems for people in other parts of the world, and
we would not grow it if we had water," Ziauddin said. "Every time we go to
the city for our money, they tell us to come back later. . . . This is our
livelihood. Soon we will have no choice but to plant."

The frustration expressed by Ziauddin and his neighbors is the unintended
fallout from an internationally backed effort to eradicate poppy
cultivation in Afghanistan, which produces about 75 percent of the opium
used for making heroin worldwide. Repeatedly undermined by a variety of
problems, including subterfuge and sabotage by growers, logistical delays,
political rivalries and physical violence, the ambitious three-month effort
ended recently with only 25 percent of the crop destroyed and the rest
making its way through the illegal pipeline to addicts in the West.

Poppies have been harvested in small amounts for generations in
Afghanistan, but as world demand for heroin soared in the 1960s and '70s,
more and more Afghan farmers switched to poppies, which yield 20 times the
price of wheat.

Poppy cultivation peaked in 1999, with 225,000 acres sown and 5,050 tons of
opium produced, while most of Afghanistan was ruled by the Islamic Taliban
movement. But the Taliban suddenly banned the crop and succeeded in
virtually wiping it out, with only 19,000 acres grown last year, according
to the U.N. Drug Control Program.

After the Taliban collapsed last November under a U.S.-led military
assault, however, many farmers returned to growing poppies. By February, a
U.N. land survey predicted that 2,095 to 2,975 tons of opium would be
produced in Afghanistan this year.

"People weren't sure whether the Taliban were going to fall or not last
year, so some planted poppy and some didn't, but already the level is back
up to about half what it was," said Mohammed Alim, the U.N. program's
regional director in Jalalabad.

The government of President Hamid Karzai, which was installed by the United
Nations in December with Western backing, came under strong foreign
pressure to halt the poppy revival, and in February Karzai banned production.

As a short-term incentive, the British government offered to subsidize
farmers who agreed to destroy their plants. Most of the heroin consumed in
Britain originates in Afghanistan. Other donors promised longer-term
projects to dig wells and irrigation canals so farmers could switch back to
edible crops.

Eradication began in April, and one of its major targets was here in
Nangahar province, a rich agricultural region in eastern Afghanistan that
is a major poppy producer. Abdul Qadir, then the provincial governor,
visited numerous villages urging farmers to comply, but last month he was
assassinated in Kabul, where he had just been named a vice president.

"He asked us not to grow poppy, and we told him we had no water to grow
anything else. He promised to bring us water, and because we respected him
as an elder, we obeyed," said Sahar Gul, 80, a farmer in Qadir's native
Sukh Rod district. "Two or three days later, he was killed. Now we don't
know whether we will get water or not."

But the anti-poppy drive in Nangahar was plagued by other problems long
before Qadir's death. In Shinwar district, mobs of angry farmers blocked
the roads to prevent eradication teams from proceeding. In Chaparhar and
other districts, officials said some farmers claimed their poppy fields
were far larger than government surveys showed, and others harvested early
to beat the eradication deadline.

According to a British official who worked with the program, government
videotapes of workers chopping down poppy plants showed farmers in the
background, frantically slitting poppy bulbs to obtain as much opium sap as
possible before the plants were crushed.

"They wanted to have their cake and eat it too," said the official, adding
that Qadir's personal eradication drive was conducted without the necessary
supervision, leaving many crop areas unsurveyed and proper payment
virtually impossible to calculate. "Everything went out of control," he said.

By last month, workers had chopped down more than 41,000 acres of plants in
Nangahar and the other principal growing regions, and at least $11 million
had been doled out to complying farmers in Nangahar alone.

But officials stopped the eradication program with only a little over 25
percent of the crop destroyed. They also suspended the delivery of payments
in areas where they suspected farmers had inflated their crop size or
harvested early, and where disputes had arisen over the proper payment.

Gul Agha Hasini, director of a nonprofit agency in Jalalabad that acted as
intermediary between the farmers and foreign donors, estimated that while
about 135,000 one-fifteenth-acre plots have been chopped down in Nangahar,
farmers have been paid for only about 32,000.

"It has not been a successful process," he said. "What people really need
are wells and irrigation channels and roads and jobs. If this
rehabilitation work gets underway, I guarantee you nobody will grow poppy.
But if it doesn't, they definitely will."

Din Mohammed, the older brother of Qadir who was recently named to replace
him as governor, said last week that he supports the anti- poppy cause but
opposes giving farmers cash for their crops. He said he would rather see
international donors bring in long-term rural economic development projects.

"We need to start this work now, not wait until the poppy is in the ground
again," Mohammed said in an interview. Noting that Nangahar borders the
lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, where some Taliban and al Qaeda forces
are believed to be hiding, he said that if the farmers are "unhappy with
us, they may join the opposition."

In Chaparhar district, a parched and desolate area dotted with ruins where
Taliban and al Qaeda fighters once lived, angry poppy farmers said last
week that they are not eager to defy the government. But unless they are
paid, they warned, they will soon unwrap their precious hoards of tiny
poppy seeds and begin planting them.

"We are not in love with poppy. We grow it because we have to," said a
farmer named Mohammed Azim. "The government has destroyed our land and then
paid us nothing. We had 240 [irrigation channels], and they have all dried
up. Even the trees have died. If we don't get our due very soon, we are
ready to start growing again."