POPPIES SET TO BLOOM AGAIN

Come spring, the poppies will be blooming in Afghanistan again.

"This is the time for planting," said Abdul Wakil, a 54-year-old farmer.
"This year, 400 families here in the village will cultivate it. We take the
opium and put it in a bag. Then we search for customers at the Friday bazaar.

"There is no other way to survive. I have 10 children. There are 28 people
in my house."

There is nothing to do here except farming, and there is not enough profit
in wheat or corn to make a living, the farmers say. The only way is to make
money from the cultivation of poppies.

The Taliban are gone and so is their ban on growing opium poppies.
Afghanistan's production of raw opium fell from a world-record peak of more
than 450,000 kilograms in 1999 to a mere 18,000 kilograms this year, a 96
per cent decline, according to the UN drug-control program.

Say what you will about the Taliban, they just said no to poppies,
imprisoning farmers who defied them. But now Afghanistan can be expected to
regain its status as the world's leading source of opium in a year or two.

In late April, the children will slit the flowers' fat bulbs and scrape the
ooze into a sack. Buyers will pay the farmers $US100 ($A193) or more per
kilogram, at least 100 times what fruits and vegetables will bring.

The opium will be hauled over the mountains using trucks, taxis and mules
to Pakistan, where refiners will turn it into heroin worth billions of
dollars for millions of addicts worldwide.

"This is my message to the world," Wakil said. "Help us establish
industries in Afghanistan. We are tough people, hard workers, and we would
happily quit the cultivation of poppy. But here there are no industries, no
factories, nothing, and we need to take the money from the one remaining
source."

The economics of opium in Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest nations,
are so stark as to defy argument. Aubaidullah, a 22-year-old farmer in
Kherabad who is sowing poppy seeds, explained them well.

He said he planted one hectare of poppy last year and turned a profit of
$US13,000, allowing him to feed 15 people in his extended family and buy
two new oxen to plough his fields. If he had planted wheat and vegetables
on that land, he might have made $US100, he said. Furthermore, Afghanistan
has gone through a four-year drought, and poppies need far less water than
vegetables or grain.

Shamshul Haq has the unenviable job of deputy chief drug-control officer in
Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, the second biggest
opium-producing province in the 1990s.

His duties have become unclear under the new self-proclaimed government in
eastern Afghanistan, the Eastern Shura. A chief official of the new
ministry of law and order, Sorhab Qadri, said last Sunday that "the top
authorities have not yet decided whether to let the farmers continue
cultivating poppies".

Nangarhar had almost 20,000 hectares planted with poppy last year. That was
enough to produce about 110,000 kilograms of heroin base, Haq said, and
represented 85 per cent or more of all farm income in the province. That
fell to less than 220 hectares in the two growing seasons this year, a
decline of almost 99 per cent. But Haq said poppy planting was soaring in
Afghanistan.

"Without a lot of help from the world community, they (farmers) will grow
it not only in their fields but on the roofs and in their flowerpots," Haq
said.

The Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation in no way meant a ban on opium
sales, farmers and dealers say. Nearly a year's supply had been stashed away.

In a hole in the wall deep in the Jalalabad bazaar, Gul Zaman conducts his
opium business. Business is good, he says with a smile. It has been good
for two years.

"The Taliban regime was the first in the history of Afghanistan to stop the
cultivation of poppy," he said. "It simply isn't possible for anyone except
the Taliban to stop it. They had real power. The present regime does not."