Pubdate: Mon, 01 Apr 2002
Source: Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA)
Copyright: 2002 Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Contact:  http://www.telegram.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/509
Note: only publishes letters from state residents.
Author: Tim Golden, The New York Times

U.S. BRACES FOR OPIUM TSUNAMI

American officials have quietly abandoned their hopes of reducing 
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 considered measures such as 
paying Afghan opium poppy farmers to plow under their fields, they have 
concluded that continuing lawlessness and political instability will make 
significant eradication all but impossible.

Instead, U.S. officials said, they will pursue a less ambitious strategy: 
persuading Afghan leaders to carry out a modest eradication program as 
opium poppies are harvested over the next two months, if only to show that 
they were serious in declaring a ban on production in January.

The Americans will also encourage the destruction of opium-processing 
laboratories and a crackdown on brokers, while providing money to 
strengthen anti-smuggling activities by neighboring countries. The campaign 
is being strongly backed and even to some extent led by Britain, which 
traces nearly all the 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 once again.

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

Reducing the output of opium is a major goal of the international 
rebuilding effort in Afghanistan.

Until the Taliban banned the cultivation of opium poppies 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. 
Now, the profits that flowed to local leaders aligned with the Taliban are 
expected to enrich tribal leaders and warlords whose support is vital to 
the American-backed interim 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 poppy farming 
remains one of the few viable economic activities, officials added, any 
intense eradication effort could imperil the stability of the government 
and hamper the military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

"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, after several years in which the Taliban quietly 
encouraged poppy farming, cut the country's opium output from an estimated 
4,042 tons in 2000, about 71 percent of the world's supply, to just 82 tons 
the next year, according to the CIA. 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 in the harvest left many small landowners and sharecroppers 
deeply in debt. In the absence of any rural-credit system, larger 
landholders customarily lend smaller poppy 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 in Afghanistan said a considerable number of 
refugees fleeing into Pakistan with their families 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, Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, announced a new ban on 
poppy 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 Karzai's ban, it was issued only 
after the poppies had been planted and without any viable means of 
implementation.

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 Administration, Asa Hutchinson, told Congress recently.

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 favorable 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 U.N. International Drug Control 
Program estimated that Afghanistan's poppy fields could reach 111,000 acres 
to 161,000 acres. A similar-sized area was cultivated in the mid-1990s; the 
crop's peak of 224,918 acres was planted in the fall of 1999 and harvested 
in 2000.

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 U.S. 
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 2 1/2 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 Britain and Germany even when the world supply 
plummeted the next year because of the Afghans' ban.

Even now, U.N. 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, U.S. and European officials considered trying to buy up this 
year's harvest and then destroy it. That proposal was quickly abandoned, 
however, after objections from Germany, Italy and Scandinavian countries 
that it would 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 ensure that pledges to eradicate were fulfilled.
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