UN: AFGHAN OPIUM FARMERS NEED AID

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Afghanistan's new ban on the cultivation of opium
poppy will take a bite out of the global narcotics trade, but only if
farmers get aid as an incentive not to grow it, the U.N. drug agency said
Thursday.

Afghan farmers, landowners and sharecroppers need an alternate means of
earning a living before they can be expected to withstand the temptation to
grow lucrative poppy, the Vienna-based U.N. Office for Drug Control and
Crime Prevention said.

"The interim administration (of Afghanistan) ... needs to provide immediate
assistance to farmers as a first step in sustainable alternative
development, with commercial agricultural crops replacing opium poppy as
the source of farmers' livelihoods," the agency said in a statement.

It said poppies were being grown again "not only because of the breakdown
in law and order, but also because the farmers are desperate to find a
means of survival following the prolonged drought" that has inflicted
misery on Afghans over the past few years.

On Wednesday, Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai issued a decree
prohibiting poppy production and the production and trafficking in
narcotics, including opium and heroin.

Narcotics have been a major source of illicit income for Afghanistan, which
produces much of the opium and heroin used in Europe, and Karzai's
administration has been under pressure to launch a full-scale crackdown
against the trade.

In October, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics
estimated that the Taliban collected at least $40 million in kickbacks and
fees from the opium trade before the militia's leader, Mullah Mohammed
Omar, banned poppy cultivation as un-Islamic in 2000.

Because there are indications that poppy cultivation has resumed since last
October in some areas, the interim government will have to work quickly to
make sure the spring harvest doesn't reach global drug markets, the agency
said.

In 1999, the year before the Taliban ban, Afghanistan produced nearly
three-fourths of the world's opium at a rate of 4,000 tons a year.