Source: Seattle-Times (WA) Pubdate: Wednesday 03 June 1998 Contact: http://seattletimes.com/ Author: R. Jeffrey Smith and Douglas Farah, The Washington Post U.N. WANTS WORLDWIDE EFFORT TO ERADICATE DRUG CROPS The United Nations plans to seek new international backing for the most ambitious counter-narcotics effort in its history. But the United States and other wealthy nations are resisting pleas to fund the program partly because it would spend billions of dollars in some of the world's most corrupt or repressive nations, such as Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia, according to U.S. and U.N. officials. The overall objective of the plan is to eradicate the world's entire production of heroin, cocaine and marijuana over 10 years. The cost of the plan has been estimated at $3 billion to $4 billion over the next 10 years, a roughly four-fold increase from what all governments combined would spend over the next decade at present levels to promote the substitution of legal crops for illegal ones, the officials said. But President Clinton's top drug-policy aides have advised U.N. officials that Washington is unwilling to commit substantial new money to the effort because the program remains unformed, has yet to attract support from key European and Middle Eastern donors and would probably provoke political opposition at home from human-rights activists and critics of the United Nations. Pino Arlacchi, a former Italian lawmaker who was appointed last September as the U.N.'s chief counter-narcotics official, nonetheless vows to pursue the plan. Arlacchi's idea, which has been sketched out in a 170-page report entitled "Strategy for Coca and Opium Poppy Elimination," calls for promoting rural development and crop substitution to create legitimate employment alternatives to drug production in the nine principal growing nations: Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan and Vietnam. According to U.N. estimates, the amount of land devoted to growing coca leaf or opium poppy in all these countries is just 4,500 square kilometers, or half the area of Puerto Rico. That gives supporters of the program hope that concentrated efforts can overcome the low success rate of traditional crop-substitution efforts, which many experts say have failed because of the lack of roads and facilities to handle legal crops. Arlacchi said a modest investment in the social and economic development of drug-growing regions in Pakistan has cut opium production from 800 to 20 tons a year. The key, he said, was the introduction of a crop of off-season onions that could be marketed throughout the year. Arlacchi's tenure at the United Nations has been distinguished in part by his desire to try to work out new counter-drug arrangements with the political rulers of Afghanistan and Myanmar, the countries that together cultivate 80 percent of the world's illicit opium poppies but remain in virtual diplomatic isolation. He already has struck a deal with the Taliban, the Islamic extremist party that now controls more than two-thirds of Afghanistan, to fund a series of small-scale development projects such as the reconstruction of a factory in the province of Kandahar that will provide work for thousands of impoverished local citizens. Last month, he organized a similar pilot project in Myanmar. Washington has pledged $5 million toward the $15 million cost of the project, which is meant to promote rural development. In both nations, Arlacchi's idea is to create employment alternatives to drug-related work. He wants to spend an estimated $500 million there over the next decade. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other top U.S. officials have said Washington generally opposes substantial new aid to Afghanistan so long as Taliban ideologues block women from access to education, jobs and health care. - --- Checked-by: (trikydik)