Afghan opium boom spreads to traditional farmers

By Jason Szep

BAGH-E-AFGHAN, Afghanistan, May 5 (Reuters) - Sayed Mohammed runs a hand over a poppy bulb oozing with raw opium, his eyes light up and his toothless smile broadens when asked why he grows the heroin-producing crop on his farm in central Afghanistan.

"Growing poppies pays 10 times more than cultivating other crops," the affable 60-year-old says. "We grow these poppies because we have no choice. Most people here do not have jobs."

Mohammed is one of hundreds of farmers in the world's top opium-producing country who planted their first poppy crop this year, hoping global demand for opium derivatives morphine and heroin will bring relief from grinding poverty.

President Hamid Karzai last month called for a holy war, or "jihad", on drugs, after opium output reached a near-record 3,600 tonnes in 2003 - equivalent to three-quarters of world supply.

With traditional wheat and onion farmers such as Mohammed joining the drugs business, the area under cultivation could leap 30 percent this year to more than 100,000 hectares (247,100 acres), Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalili told Reuters.

"It's a significant problem. It's getting to be even a larger problem," he said in an interview.

But while the brightly colored flowers blooming at the tips of greenish stems are taking up more acreage, Afghanistan's total production could drop from last year, said the country's chief drug fighter, Mirwais Yasini.

A fungus disease has destroyed about 70 percent of this year's crop in the biggest poppy-producing province, Nangarhar, he said. It is also spreading across Helmand, the second biggest.

"The amount of land used for poppy will increase but the yield will be less than last year," said Yasini, director-general of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Department, in a Kabul office guarded by soldiers in military fatigues with machine guns.

"Eradication measures will also reduce the crop," he added.

That defies comments by a top U.S. Agriculture Department official, Jim Moseley, who estimated this year's harvest at 5,400 tonnes, up 50 percent from last year. He says Afghanistan could only hope to turn the tide next year.

NARCO-STATE

While illicit drug production is on the wane in Myanmar, Laos, Colombia and Peru, it flourishes in Afghanistan to feed a growing heroin market in Central Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, say officials at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Though they know it is illegal, a quarter of all Afghan farmers grow the poppies anyway, a UNODC survey showed this year, underlining concerns voiced by some UN officials that Afghanistan risks sliding into a state of narco-terrorists and drug cartels.

In a country where the average daily pay is $2, farmers earned $1.02 billion from opium in 2003, or $3,900 per family. Add traffickers' profits, and opium generated $2.3 billion in 2003 - equivalent to half the Afghan economy, the UN says.

Poppies have blossomed since the United States toppled Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers, whose zealous opium crackdown in 2001 cut global heroin production by two-thirds that year, according to a study by Loughborough University in England.

Karzai, struggling to exert authority on provinces controlled largely by militia commanders who often benefit from the opium trade, says the illicit money helps finance a resurgent Taliban guerrilla force and its Qaeda allies.

This view was backed by a UN Security Council panel that said recently the Taliban were charging drug traffickers who pass through the areas they control, then using the money to buy arms.

A force of 15,500 U.S.-led foreign troops is hunting for the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan's south, but has been criticized for doing little to stop the trade or destroy poppies.

Even government officials are involved, Jalili said.

"Some of these local commanders, even government officials, have cultivated poppies on their land, or leased land and they have grown poppies, or they encourage farmers to grow poppies so they can tax them and get their cut - 10 percent usually.

"This is a source of income for the warlords and regional factions to pay their soldiers," Jalili added. "The terrorists are funding their operations through illicit drug trade, so they are all interlinked."

POPPY POLICE

Karzai has called on Afghans to battle drugs with the same passion they showed in their holy war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, urging Muslim leaders to take up the cause. He has targeted eradication of 25 percent of this year's crop.

May begins a new phase in that effort as "central eradication units" fan out to the provinces backed by security forces. Initial targets are fields run by powerful militia commanders rather than those of poorer farmers, Jalili said.

On Mohammed's farm along the Ghorband River in the dry Bagh Afghan Hills of central Parwan province, the benefits boil down to simple arithmetic.

"If we cultivate 70 kg (150 lb) wheat and seven kg (15 lb) of poppy, the poppy still pays more," he says, referring to raw opium extracted as an opaque, milky sap from the poppy's pod once its flower petals drop away.

In Afghanistan's increasingly sophisticated drug market, where prices often move on rumors of eradication plans, raw opium can fetch $180 a kg, an unprecedented harvest for new opium farmers such as the white-bearded Mohammed.

(Article is no longer on reuters.com)