AFGHANS SAY OPIUM SUPPLY BEING REDUCED

Kabul, Afghanistan -- Ten days into its ambitious program to cut off
supplies of opium, the interim government announced Saturday that it had
destroyed poppy fields that might produce more than 100 tons of the drug,
with a European street value of $600 million.

In the first week of eradication in the country's two largest poppy-growing
provinces, Helmand and Nangahar, authorities used tractors and sticks to
destroy just over 5,000 acres of poppies, and paid farmers almost $3
million in compensation, said Ashraf Ghani, chief adviser to interim leader
Hamid Karzai.

While the street value of the destroyed crop may sound high, it represents
a small fraction of this year's predicted opium harvest. With estimates of
more than 160,000 acres of poppies planted last fall, Afghan farmers
expected to turn the crop into more than 3,000 tons of opium this year,
according to surveys by the UN Drug Control Program and the Afghan government.

Ghani said eradication would expand to four other poppy-growing provinces
and would finish in three weeks. "We are in a race against time," he said,
acknowledging that harvesting has begun in some places.

If destruction continues at the current pace, only 14 percent of the poppy
crop will be eliminated -- and Afghanistan could still be the world's
largest supplier of opium this year.

"We will not have time to effect complete eradication," Ghani said. He
asserted that "a significant change in attitudes has occured." Some
voluntary eradication has begun, he said, adding that authorities have
gotten promises from farmers not to grow poppies again next year.

In the 1990s, Afghanistan became the world's main producer of opium, the
narcotic from which heroin is derived, until a strict ban on poppy
cultivation by the Taliban in 2000 reduced last year's harvest to almost
zero. But when the Taliban's days appeared numbered during the US-led war
last fall, farmers replanted poppies, before a ban issued by the new
government on Jan. 17.

Ghani denied allegations made by farmers in Helmand Province that Karzai
(who secretly entered neighboring Uruzgan Province last October to drum up
anti-Taliban forces) had promised to let farmers plant poppies if they
helped him topple the hard-line Islamist regime. Ghani said that he had met
recently with 400 Helmand farmers, and that "not a single person raised
this issue."

The eradication program appears to be going more smoothly than early signs
had suggested. Two weeks ago in Helmand, police killed eight farmers and
wounded dozens who had been protesting the program. In Nangahar, farmers
blocked roads and pelted vehicles with stones.