Pubdate: Sat, 8 Aug 2009
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A01, Front Page
Copyright: 2009 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer
Note: Correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul and staff writer Greg 
Jaffe contributed to this report.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://drugnews.org/topic/poppy (Poppy)

U.S. AND BRITAIN AGAIN TARGET AFGHAN POPPIES

Farmers Would Be Paid Not to Grow Crop

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars 
over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to 
plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and 
a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, 
offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on 
roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to 
provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early 
October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on 
loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with 
the spring harvest.

"We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away," said a 
senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan.

The program replaces the Bush administration's focus on crop 
eradication, which "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars," 
according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special 
representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Destroying the crops 
succeeded only in "alienat[ing] poor farmers" and "driving people 
into the hands of the Taliban," he told reporters last week.

But many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programs have failed 
as well, from Asia to Latin America. A similar plan in Colombia, 
begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of 
cocaine production, although the country began to stabilize in recent 
years as its U.S.-trained military adopted new strategies against 
armed insurgents and civil institutions were strengthened.

Officials maintain that the new Afghan plan differs from unsuccessful 
"alternative" plans because it is an integral part of a 
military-development strategy that includes tens of thousands of U.S. 
troops to keep the Taliban and traffickers at bay while Afghan 
security forces are being trained. Plans call for hundreds of U.S. 
and international aid experts to work directly with farmers and local 
officials until the Afghan government has matured.

"The way [the assistance] is offered is important," said the senior 
U.S. military official, one of several who spoke on the condition of 
anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program on 
the record. "We are not providing subsidies . . . we are not just 
handing out cash." Farmers will have a "stake" in the program, he 
said, buying vouchers for seeds and fertilizers for about 10 percent 
of their value. Cash will be distributed only as credit or for work 
performed, the official added.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have long debated 
whether they should simply pay farmers for not planting poppy, a 
short-term fix that experts have deemed counterproductive. Farmers 
probably would take the money and "grow it anyways," said another 
U.S. official in Afghanistan. "We would likely drive the price up," 
he added, "as there would now be competition between the narcotics 
trade and the government. More farmers would therefore plant more 
poppy next year."

The epicenter of the overlapping wars against opium production and 
the Taliban is southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, where more 
than two-thirds of the country's poppy is grown. Thousands of Marines 
and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there 
against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in 
villages as they are cleared.

"By this time next year," the senior military official said, "what we 
want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric 
of success. If we don't get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, 
we're not going to get the results we'd like."

The timeline is daunting. A planned "civilian surge" of hundreds of 
U.S. aid officials and agriculture experts has been slow to arrive. A 
micro-finance loan program is in the planning stages, and although 
$300 million in aid has been set aside for "rapid response" 
initiatives, including voucher programs for seeds and fertilizer, 
distribution has been sluggish. Mohammad Gulab Mangal, the governor 
of Helmand, whom U.S. officials have praised for encouraging local 
communities to turn away from poppy, held the first of eight 
scheduled outreach meetings only last week.

The plan also includes stepped-up efforts to interdict drug shipments 
and destroy stockpiles. The Drug Enforcement Administration expects 
to increase its manpower on the ground from 13 agents in 2008 to 81 
by the end of this year. The Marine assault in Helmand, a DEA 
official in Kabul said, has "greatly enhanced" the agency's ability 
to take action there, he said.

The DEA is also training Afghan police in counternarcotics 
investigations, and the Justice Department is developing a program 
for Afghan prosecutors, although those efforts are said to be moving 
slowly. Officials disagree over how much of the profit from 
Afghanistan's opium exports goes directly into Taliban coffers. 
According to Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy 
individuals in the Persian Gulf region. But there is widespread 
agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, 
corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to 
continue cultivation, processing and exports.

Some of the greatest challenges to the new strategy are at the level 
of farmhouse economics. More than 365,000 Afghan farm households 
earned about $730 million from poppy last year -- a fraction of the 
$3.4 billion earned from opium exports, according to the United 
Nations, but an amount nearly equal to the national government's $750 
million in official revenue.

"The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 
2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing 
households," the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and 
"farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income," 70 percent of 
which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with 
about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about 
$2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 
percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he 
would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed 
capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum 
oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per 
acre is highest, capsules are lanced an average of four times in a 
labor-intensive process.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and 
the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of 
unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the 
United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and 
opium "lancing/gum collection" pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for 
lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

"What we're looking for is a way to compete with that," the senior 
military official said of the opium economy. "This is not easy. . . . 
There is no silver bullet."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake