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Opium farmers hooked on profits despite government ban
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Copyright ) 1997 Nando.net
Copyright ) 1997 Reuters
LASHKAR-GHA, Afghanistan (November 27, 1997 10:47 a.m. EST
http://www.nando.net) - Seeds for half the world's 1998 opium harvest
are already germinating in the fields of Afghanistan despite pledges by
the country's Taliban authorities to eradicate opium poppy cultivation.
For the moment, at least, farmers in Helmand province in southwestern
Afghanistan -- the country's richest opium-growing area -- are not as
worried about a government ban on their crop as they are that birds will
eat the poppy seeds they have just planted.
Strips of white plastic tied to stakes flutter in a cool breeze along
the perimeter of Haji Agha Mohamed's two small plots outside
Lashkar-Gha.
And, just in case the pennants are not enough to frighten the birds
away, he has assigned two of his younger sons to act as human scarecrows
by scampering about the fields.
"We have sown the seeds. There is nothing to do over the winter except
to protect the crop," said the 60-year-old farmer.
If all goes well, Haji Agha and members of his family will move through
the field next June scarring ripe opium bulbs with special knives and
scraping off the gum which oozes out.
The raw opium will then be sold to local traders and smuggled over a
labyrinth of trails into neighbouring Pakistan, Iran and Turkmenistan by
camel, donkey, truck and on foot.
Dried and refined into heroin in laboratories along the way, most of the
product will end up in Europe, the United States or Pakistan, where
there is a large addict population.
A small tenant farmer with 23 dependants, Haji Agha cleared $5,000 on
his 1997 opium crop -- a good living in a country where the average per
capita income is $100 annually. As a result, he planted even more land
in opium poppy for next year.
The United Nations' new drug czar, Pino Arlacchi, whose reputation as a
crime fighter springs from successful battles against the mafia in his
native Italy, plans to stamp out opium production in Afghanistan over
five years, and around the world in 10.
"In Afghanistan it is a matter of helping the Taleban do something they
want to do anyway as strict Moslems," Arlacchi, director of the U.N.
International Drug Control Programme, told reporters during a visit to
Helmand this week.
"The key is to mobilise resources from the international community to
provide farmers with the irrigation, seed, fertiliser and machinery they
need to raise alternative crops."
Foreign reluctance to invest in a country still divided and at war,
grave reservations about the Taleban's human rights record and
resistance from well-entrenched criminal elements make Arlacchi's plan a
long shot at best.
Anxious to convert sceptics, Arlacchi points out that Helmand was once
Afghanistan's breadbasket, by virtue of a massive irrigation system
built by the United States in the 1960s. Thanks to the Cold War, what
had been desert suddenly sprouted with wheat, cotton, vegetables and
fruit.
While opium poppy was always grown in Helmand and elsewhere in
Afghanistan, U.N. officials say it was a minor crop until war and
drought disrupted supplies from the Golden Triangle in southeast Asia in
the 1970s.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, anti-communist
mujahideen fighters turned to opium cultivation and heroin production to
help finance their holy Islamic war.
In Helmand, neglect and nearly two decades of war -- first against the
Russians and then among Afghan factions -- have left the once
magnificent irrigation system in a shambles.
The main Bughra Canal is clogged with silt and many of its sluice gates
are damaged and inoperative, as are subsidiary canals and ditches
distributing water to individual plots.
The corps of engineers and technicians who once managed the province's
intricate water system no longer exists.
But with the Taleban ruling 80 percent of Afghanistan's land area and
disposed to ban opium as a matter of Islamic principle, Arlacchi hopes
to make a prohibition on poppy cultivation practical by providing
farmers with an economic carrot.
Haji Agha is ready. "Repairing our irrigation system is the main thing
because right now it is dry in the summer and I can only grow one crop,"
he explained.
"With water and better seed and some machines and fertiliser, I could
plant two crops every year. I would grow wheat or cotton or maize, not
opium. I could plant more land and make more money with less work."
-- By Kurt Schork, Reuters
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