AFGHANISTAN TO PAY FARMERS FOR UPROOTED POPPIES

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 4 - With this country's vast fields of
poppies ready to flower soon, Afghan officials said today that they
would embark on a novel plan to pay farmers to destroy their crops,
whether they want to or not.

Ashraf Ghani, a senior adviser to Hamid Karzai, the chairman of the
interim government, said that agents of the Afghan government would
fan out across three Afghan provinces thought to produce about 90
percent of the country's opium.

The undisclosed cost will be borne by the United States, Britain and
other Western countries, which have been pressuring the Afghan
government to crack down on poppy production. In recent months, there
have been some suggestions that Western nations would condition aid
pledged to Afghanistan on efforts by the Karzai government to attack
poppy cultivation. Mr. Ghani said this was not the case.

Under the plan, the Afghan officials will offer poppy farmers around
$500 per acre to destroy their plants. If the farmers refuse, Mr.
Ghani said, the officials will destroy the crops anyway.

The initiative represents a last-ditch effort to forestall a big
comeback for poppy production in Afghanistan, which had become the
world's largest supplier of opium until the then-ruling Taliban
cracked down on production, which led to a sharply reduced harvest
last year.

After the collapse of the Taliban in the fall, many of the farmers
who had successfully cultivated poppies rushed to plant again, and
this year's crop is now expected to be as large as some of those in
the mid or late 1990's, when the Taliban was encouraging poppy
production, apparently to raise money.

The initiative announced today is designed to blunt the economic
impact of curtailing the crop. One proposal is to provide jobs for
farm laborers who would ordinarily harvest the poppies.

Racing to beat the harvest, which would otherwise begin within weeks,
government officials will begin handing out cash later this month in
Badakshan Province in eastern Afghanistan, Helmand Province in the
south and Nangarhar in the northeast, the three centers of poppy
production here. The payments, which will be made on the spot, are
designed to pay the farmer slightly more than what he would have made
had he grown wheat, not opium poppies.

The initiative raises the possibility of a confrontation between the
fledgling government and the poppy farmers, who are known for their
sometimes violent resistance to attempts to prevent them from growing
their prized crops.

Still, Mr. Ghani said that if the farmers refused to destroy their
crops, the government was prepared to do the job for them. ``State
power is based on the legitimate use of force,'' Mr. Ghani said. ``We
hope it doesn't reach that point.''

In impoverished, drought-stricken Afghanistan, the crop has proved to
be one of the few reliable sources of a decent income. Poppies also
use far less water than wheat or corn.

For all these reasons, Western officials have largely abandoned hopes
of eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop this year. Even so, Mr. Ghani
and Yunus Qanooni, the interior minister, said that the Karzai
government was determined to eliminate poppy farming as a viable
occupation. In a decree signed by Mr. Karzai earlier this week, the
repayment of loans in opium was prohibited. The practice is
widespread among poppy farmers and effectively imposes interest rates
of as much as 500 percent per year on the farmer. Mr. Karzai also
ordered the closing of opium shops.