Afghan farmers will produce 4,000 tons of opium this season

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Mohammed Din said he had two choices to survive Afghanistan's crushing poverty: beg or grow poppies.

Despite a countrywide ban by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he chose poppies -- the crop used to make heroin.

The United Nations says Din is not alone.

Afghanistan is expected to have a bumper harvest this season and produce about 4,000 tons of opium, making it the world's No. 1 producer again, a record it had held prior to the eradication of poppies by the Taliban rulers in 2001.

A preliminary survey of 134 districts of Afghanistan, carried out last month by both the United Nations and the Afghan anti-narcotics division, showed a rise in poppy production even in areas not previously known for the crop.

Nearly 80 percent of Bamiyan province is growing poppies as well as much of central Ghor province ---- neither poppy-growing areas in the past, says Nasir Ahmed, of the U.N. Drug Agency in southern Kandahar.

Ahmed trained dozens of Afghan men on how to question farmers, without getting them angry and getting thrown off their fields. Responses will be included in a survey over the next four months.

"There is a way to ask the questions, to make the farmers understand that by answering the questions they are not going to have their crops destroyed," Ahmed said. "The surveyor learns how to explain to the elders that we are here just to ask questions."

'We have no choice'

With eight children to feed, scarce water supplies and hardly any money, Din isn't listening to Karzai's order to stop growing poppies.

"We have no choice. if the government destroys our fields there will be nothing left for us to do but to beg," he said squatting over his parched earth.

Whether he grows wheat or poppies, Din has to pay roughly $60 a month to run the pump that brings water to his land. He said he gets 50 cents for a bushel of wheat that costs him $1.10 to produce mostly because of the cost of diesel to irrigate the land.

Din farms in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, one of the biggest opium-producing regions in the country. The other big producer is Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province.

Workers get $1.50 a day to slit the poppy bulb and collect the juice. Harvesting wheat pays the seasonal laborer barely $2 a month.

On either side of the main road that stretches from the Pakistan border of Torkham to Jalalabad, the Nangarhar provincial capital, poppies flutter in the midmorning breeze. Nangarhar produces more than 25 percent of all poppies grown in Afghanistan.

In the last years of Taliban rule poppy growing was gradually eliminated -- 15 percent one year, 30 percent the next. In the final year, it was virtually wiped out.

But when the Taliban collapsed in November 2001, some farmers ripped out their wheat crop and replanted poppies.

Ahmed said weaning farmers off poppy requires a massive investment in infrastructure -- roads to allow farmers to bring their harvested wheat to market; dams to provide water for irrigation; schools and health clinics to improve village living.

In southern Kandahar, the former Taliban heartland, Shafi Ullah, the provincial government's point man on drugs, says farmers have no money, are deeply in debt and will not easily give up growing poppies.

Last year the international community was providing roughly $350 to each farmer not to grow poppies. Some took the money which was given in check form but later discovered they couldn't cash the check, Ullah said. "There are no working banks here. There was nowhere for them to go to cash the money. It was just a worthless piece of paper."

This year Karzai vetoed a financial incentive to farmers, demanding an immediate end to the cultivation and promising infrastructure reconstruction.

"But the government itself has no money. The United Nations and the world is promising us help, but in the provinces they haven't done anything for the farmers," Ullah said.

Now he has his order to destroy crops, but he is worried it could mean a bitter confrontation with the farmers.

"We have warned the farmers two and three times. We have told them it is prohibited completely. Now we are going to have to destroy crops, but in my thinking it will cause problems," he said.