U.S. Fears Afghan Farmers Can't End Cash Crop: Opium

American officials have quietly abandoned their hopes to reduce
Afghanistan's opium production substantially this year and are now bracing
for a harvest large enough to inundate the world's heroin and opium markets
with cheap drugs.

While American and European officials have debated such measures as paying
Afghan opium farmers to plow under their fields, they have concluded that
continuing lawlessness and political instability will make eradication all
but impossible.

Instead, United States officials will pursue a less ambitious strategy:
They have begun trying to persuade Afghan leaders to carry out a modest
destruction program as opium poppies are harvested over the next two
months, if only to show they were serious last January in declaring a ban
on production.

The Americans will also encourage destruction of opium-processing
laboratories and a crackdown on brokers, while providing funds to
strengthen antisumggling activities by neighboring countries. The campaign
is being strongly backed and even to some extent led by Britain, which
traces nearly all heroin on its streets to Afghanistan.

But the continuing upheaval in and around Afghanistan will limit the
effectiveness of those strategies, American and British officials admit,
making it likely that Afghanistan will produce enough opium to dominate the
world supply again.

"The fact is, there are no institutions in large parts of the country," the
Bush administration's drug policy director, John P. Walters, said in an
interview. "What we can do will be extremely limited."

Until leaders of the Taliban banned opium in their last year in power,
Afghanistan produced as much as three-fourths of the world's supply, and
taxes on the drug trade were an important source of revenue for the
Taliban. Now, the profits that flowed to the Taliban's allies are expected
to enrich tribal leaders whose support is vital to the American-backed
government.

So long as the drug trade flourishes, law-enforcement officials said, it
will fuel political rivalries, foster corruption and undermine the
authority of the central government. But because opium farming remains one
of the few viable economic activities, officials added, any intense
eradication effort could imperil the stability of the government and thus
hamper the military campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

"The fight against terrorism takes priority," one British law enforcement
official said. "The fight against narcotics comes in second."

The challenge that American and European officials face is compounded by
the surprising success the Taliban achieved in banning poppy cultivation
two years ago.

That prohibition, which came after several years in which the Taliban
quietly encouraged poppy farming, cut opium output from an estimated 4,042
tons in 2000, about 71 percent of the world's supply, to just 82 tons last
year, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. What little opium
Afghanistan produced in 2001 came almost entirely from the 10 percent of
its territory then controlled by the Northern Alliance, the backbone of the
new government.

But the decline left many small landowners and sharecroppers deep in debt.
In the absence of a credit system, larger landholders customarily loan
smaller farmers and laborers food, cooking oil or money for the winter, to
be paid back after the harvest of opium gum. The landholders also offer
fertilizer and seed in return for a portion of the crop.

Diplomats and relief officials say a considerable number of refugees
fleeing into Pakistan were opium farmers who could not pay their debts. But
as soon as the Taliban's military resistance began to crumble last fall,
many other farmers rushed to plant opium again.

On Jan. 17, with strong encouragement from the United States and the United
Nations, the chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration, Hamid Karzai,
announced a new ban on opium cultivation. His prohibition went beyond the
Taliban's decree, to include processing and trafficking, which the Taliban
had tolerated and, to some extent, profited from.

While foreign officials have applauded Mr. Karzai's ban, it was issued only
after the poppies had been planted and without any viable means of
implementation.

"Chairman Karzai can put out a decree not to grow poppy, but it takes a
law-enforcement component to enforce that decree," the administrator of the
Drug Enforcement Agency, Asa Hutchinson, has told Congress.

Now, even though the opium was planted relatively late in the season and
the fields will be affected by a continuing drought, drug-control officials
say the conditions are good enough to produce a bumper crop.

"We had a brief opportunity to significantly impact their potential to
produce opium," one senior American official involved in the effort said.
"We have lost that opportunity. What is going to occur is that this crop is
going to get out of the ground."

In a preliminary survey in February, the United Nations International Drug
Control Program estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields could reach
between 111,000 acres and 161,000 acres, an area about the size of that
cultivated in the mid-1990's but much less than its peak of 224,918 acres,
which was planted in the fall of 1999 and harvested the next year.

While it will be impossible to determine the size of the crop until the
poppies bloom and are harvested over the next two months, some United
States estimates are of a crop even larger than that projected by the
United Nations.

"What is scary about this is that it really could give them enough opium to
stockpile for two or two and a half more years," the senior American
official said.

Afghanistan's record harvest in 2000 was so large that opium dealers and
traffickers were able to set aside huge amounts of the drug, keeping heroin
prices remarkably stable in countries like Britain and Germany even when
the world supply plummeted the next year because of the Afghans' ban. Even
now, United Nations officials say, those stockpiles hold enough opium to
supply customers in Europe, Central Asia and other countries of the former
Soviet Union for perhaps another year.

Initially, United States and European officials considered trying to buy up
this year's harvest and then destroying it. That proposal was quickly
abandoned, however, after objections from Germany, Italy and Scandinavian
countries that it would only encourage the farmers to plant poppies again
next year.

A second proposal was to pay opium farmers to plow under their fields.
While that strategy has also drawn objections from some European countries,
American officials said they would readily try it if they could find people
who could move safely around the countryside, make deals with opium farmers
and then assure that pledges to eradicate are fulfilled.

The possibilities included using relief workers to negotiate with the
farmers and American soldiers to provide security, but officials said those
ideas had been rejected.

Germany has taken responsibility for helping to train and equip a new
Afghan police force, but officials expect that it will take five years or
more before such a force can operate effectively across the country. A
drug-enforcement unit in the Afghan Interior Ministry could be up and
running much sooner, officials said, but not soon enough to act against
this year's harvest.

In the meantime, American and especially British officials are pushing the
government to negotiate some modest eradication plans with Pashtun tribal
leaders and other local authorities in the important growing areas. Two
officials said intelligence officers from both countries would support
those efforts with cash and other incentives for local leaders who could
persuade farmers to plow under their opium fields.

Ultimately, their success will depend on the Afghan governent, which is
already struggling to win the loyalties of tribal leaders before the loya
jirga, or national congress, convenes in June to choose a new government.

"Do they have the control to do this?" asked Alex L. Jones, the program
director in Afghanistan for Mercy Corps, a private relief group that has
worked there for years, in a telephone interview from Kandahar. "They
depend on the various commanders, and the commanders depend on poppy
growing - whether because they get revenue from it directly or because they
need the good will of the people who grow it."

Foreign relief workers and development experts are already focused on the
enormous task of establishing sustainable alternatives for poppy farmers
before the next planting season begins in October.

Such efforts, which must fit into wider plans to revitalize the
agricultural base, will require everything from seeds for fruit, cumin and
other high-value crops to credit systems and new irrigation works and roads.

Bernard Frahi, the head of the United Nations control program for the
region, said in a telephone interview from Pakistan, "Things need to be
done very, very soon in order for farmers not to plan opium next year.