Afghan farmers replacing poppy with wheat

SURKH ROD, Afghanistan -- The top U.N. drug official is heading to Afghanistan to check out reports that farmers are heeding government calls for a "holy war" on the rampant drug trade by slashing opium cultivation.

Foreign and Afghan officials are forecasting a drop of between 30 percent and 70 percent in this year's crop, as once verdant expanses of poppies are being sown with wheat instead.

In eastern Nangarhar province and southern Helmand, poppy production could be down by more than three-quarters this year, the officials said, though reliable statistics are not yet available.

The reports suggest at least an initial response to President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-sponsored campaign against the illegal Afghan narcotics industry, which last year supplied an estimated 87 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

"I want to see it with my own eyes," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Vienna, Austria-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, as he departed Tuesday on a five-day mission to Afghanistan.

The drop in poppy cultivation -- seen in one traditional opium-producing region toured by The Associated Press last week -- is increasing pressure on the international community to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for impoverished Afghans who have survived until now by growing opium poppies, but are cooperating with authorities in switching to other crops.

"The first priority which we are supporting is self-restraint and self-eradication, and it is happening amazingly well," Rural Development Minister Haneef Atmar said. "The risks are now too high for (the farmers), and they hope the government will protect them and help them."

Skeptics say drought, disease and falling opium prices -- not Karzai's eradication program -- are responsible for the drop in cultivation.

Costa, who will meet with Karzai and other senior government ministers, cautioned this week that it could take a "generation or more" to solve the opium problem.

Poppy production soared after the U.S. invasion in 2001 that ousted the Taliban militia, which had curtailed the flourishing drug trade.

The United Nations said that although bad weather and plant disease significantly reduced the opium yield last year, the total output was about 4,200 tons. It valued the trade at $2.8 billion, or more than 60 percent of the country's 2003 gross domestic product, and warned that Afghanistan was turning into a "narco-state."

Under pressure from the United States and Europe, Karzai has called for "jihad," or holy war, against the drug industry, which is believed to benefit guerrillas, warlords and corrupt officials.

Foreign diplomats give some of the credit to Mohammed Daoud, a former militia commander and the government's top anti-narcotics cop. Daoud, a deputy interior minister, summoned provincial police chiefs to Kabul and told them they would be fired if they didn't halt poppy cultivation.

Daoud said in an interview he expected cultivation to fall by 50 percent to 70 percent this year.

A Western official involved in counternarcotics was more cautious, saying the decrease could be 30 percent or more.

Costa's representative in Afghanistan, Doris Buddenburg, said there seemed to be a reduction, but cautioned that production might also have shifted. Farmers in colder regions have yet to plant their fields at all, she added.

The U.S. government is paying thousands of people in Helmand and Nangarhar $3 a day to clean irrigation ditches and repair roads instead of planting poppy.

Atmar, the rural development minister, said he expected about $1 billion in aid this year from the United States and the European Union.

A drive last week around Nangarhar province found terraced fields planted with knee-high wheat or vegetables. Provincial officials said poppies were being grown only in remote valleys near the Pakistani border and insisted they would destroy the fields.

Farmers in two traditional growing areas of Nangarhar told an AP reporter they stopped planting poppies because they were told to by powerful local landowners and security officials.

"It was good business, but they said we should stop, and wait and see," said Abdul Wahid, a bearded sharecropper resting under a stand of mulberry trees next to his fields.

"If we get help, maybe it's gone for good. If not, we'll plant again."

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Associated Press writer William J. Kole in Vienna contributed to this report.