UN TO FORCE POPPY FARMERS TO STOP BY DESTROYING OPIUM VALUE

UNITED NATIONS officials in Afghanistan are trying to create a "flood
of drugs", which will destroy the value of opium and force poppy
farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.

After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in the
volatile south, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is
to stop the drugs from leaving the country.

"Manual eradication is incompetent and inefficient," the UNODC's
chief, Antonio Maria Costa, said during a visit to the western Afghan
province of Herat. "So we want to see more efforts to stop the flow
of drugs across Afghanistan's borders and the hitting of high-value
targets to create a market disruption.

"We want to create a flood of drugs within Afghanistan. There will be
so much opium inside Afghanistan unable to go out that the price will go down."

Officials admit the plan is a second-best solution to intensive
eradication campaigns. Last year the Afghan Government succeeded in
destroying only 3.5 per cent of the country's 157,000 hectares of
poppy because eradication teams were either attacked or bought off by
drug lords. But the attempt to use economics to tackle the $4 billion
narcotics industry is fraught with problems - not least the country's
thousands of kilometres of porous borders.

Even without attempts to disrupt the flow of drugs out of the
country, Afghanistan is destroying the value of its main export.
Overproduction, which by some estimates twice outstrips world demand,
has led to a steady fall in the value of opium.

The UNODC country chief, Jean-Luc Lemahieu, said the strategy of
capitalising on falling opium prices could be torpedoed by Chinese
drug dealers looking to supply China's heroin addicts.

"I think we have a two-year window before the Chinese pick up on the
Afghan market. Currently the Chinese dealers source their heroin from
the Golden Triangle. The networks have not yet been established."