AFGHAN POPPIES MAY BLOOM AGAIN

With The Taliban Gone, Farmers Are Returning To The Most Lucrative Crop.

SORKH ROD, AFGHANISTAN - It is planting season in eastern Afghanistan, and
a sharecropper named Katib is riding behind two oxen pulling a wooden plow,
preparing his field for next year's crop.

A few weeks ago, Katib (who uses only one name) had been planning to plant
wheat. But now that the Taliban have gone, and their drugs ban with them,
he has changed his mind. He is going back to opium poppies, which will earn
him 15 times more money.

"The Taliban told us not to cultivate poppies, so I stopped," says the
gray-bearded father of nine. "Absolutely we were forced to stop, and we
were sorry about this. I don't especially like growing poppies, but I was
worried about getting food for my stomach."

The fall of the Taliban - almost universally welcomed here - is bad news
for international drug controllers who fear the change of government in
Kabul will bring a new flood of raw opium and its processed form, heroin,
onto world markets.

"The most likely scenario is replanting" of poppies, predicts Thomas
Pietschmann, a researcher at the Vienna-based United Nations Office for
Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCC). "The chances of getting rid of
opium completely were better before Sept. 11th."

A short-lived victory

International drug officials had been pleasantly surprised by the success
of the Taliban's ban on opium production. The authorities slashed
production this year by 94 percent, according to surveys by the ODCC.

"It was seen as a historic breakthrough in international drug control,"
says Kamal Kurspahic, the UN agency's spokesman. "Afghanistan traditionally
produced 75 percent of the world's opiates, and cutting that out meant we
were on the way to real elimination."

Prices reflected that change. A kilo of raw opium that had cost $30 at the
time of the 2000 harvest cost $300 this year, and as stockpiles dwindled,
the price rose to $700 in early September.

After Sept. 11, however, prices crashed to $90 as dealers unloaded their
stocks to hold cash in the face of the coming crisis.

With the planting season under way, many farmers in Nangarhar province, a
traditional center of the opium trade, are returning to a crop that has
always offered them more financial security, even though most devout Muslim
Afghans wouldn't touch the stuff themselves.

(Some Afghans say the Taliban themselves earned money from the opium trade,
from the Islamic system of taxation of farmers called zaqat. Under zaqat,
Islamic rulers earn 1/40th of the value of whatever crop is planted. Some
rogue officials are also rumored to have been directly involved in the
stockpiling and sale of opium, earning an estimated $30 million a year.)

Nonetheles, the new authorities are unlikely to try to do much to
discourage farmers from returning to widespread poppy cultivation, say
experts here.

"You will never find people who will ban poppies like the Taliban did,"
says Shamsul Haq, a drug-control officer from nearby Jalalabad who has
worked with both mujahadeen and Taliban governments. "It was unbelievable
... but I don't think it will happen again under the new government."

Mujahideen officials dispute this. "One hundred percent we will control
opium planting, and we will not let it occur," says Hazrat Ali, the
mujahideen's new law-and-order minister for Nangarhar province. "Not all
people in the drug trade are necessarily making money. They are wanting to
get out of this business."

But the mujahideen's track record is not convincing. Warlords have always
funded their fiefdoms through opium sales, and this year, while the Taliban
was almost eliminating poppy cultivation in the areas they controlled, the
Northern Alliance authorities allowed a threefold increase in poppy growing
in their small zone.

"This year's season will be a big harvest," he predicts.

Staff writer Peter Ford contributed to this report from Paris.