STUDY: AFGHANS GROWING OPIUM POPPY

VIENNA, Austria -- The opium poppy harvest in Afghanistan this year is
likely to return to levels seen before the ousted Taliban banned the
crop, the United Nations reported Thursday.

The Taliban, driven from power by the U.S.-led war against terrorism,
banned poppy production in July 2000. Officials said that last year,
farmers in Taliban-controlled territory reaped only 200 tons of poppy,
from which both opium and heroin are derived. That was down from 3,300
tons the year before.

The crop was sown in November in formerly Taliban-controlled regions
in the south and west of the country. The Taliban grip on power was
nearly non-existent then under the pressure of U.S. bombing. Farmers
went back to their traditional ways and the U.N. report forecasts a
harvest of 1,900 and 2,700 tons this year.

By early February, observers from the U.N. International Drug Control
Program saw small green poppy plants breaking through the soil in
areas that accounted for 84 percent of the total cultivation in 2000.

Northern Afghanistan was excluded from the survey because the colder
climate there usually delays planting.

Many poor Afghan farmers cannot resist planting poppy because of the
profit to be had, said Sumru Noyan of the UNDCP.

In Helmand province in the southwest, some farmers plowed under
germinating wheat in January to replant with poppy, the U.N. report
said. It claimed fields associated with some villages were 70 percent
under poppy cultivation.

Steinar Bjornsson, interim head of the U.N. Office for Drug Control
and Crime Prevention, said curtailing poppy production in Afghanistan
was crucial to the recovery of the impoverished, war-ravaged country.
After malnutrition, he said, drugs pose the most serious challenge to
future stability because they fund terrorism.

"The U.N. is trying to rebuild the country in perhaps its most complex
undertaking ever," he said.

The UNDCP is helping the interim Afghan government of Prime Minister
Hamid Karzai set up legal structures and law enforcement agencies that
will help authorities fight the production of drugs.

Karzai's U.N.-brokered government announced a ban on poppy production
last month, after many fields had already been sown.

The bulk of the heroin and opium derived from Afghan poppy is
transported by smugglers to Western Europe through Iran, Turkey and
the Balkans, Noyan said.