August 18, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Saani 8, 1423

CHAPARHAR (Afghanistan): Three months ago, a truckload of government workers arrived at Malik Ziauddin’s village, accompanied by armed guards. Wielding sticks and sickles, they beat and chopped at his prized crop until only useless green pulp was left.

Ziauddin, 65, a sunburned farmer, watched with mingled regret and anticipation. Like thousands of other farmers who grow opium poppies in Afghanistan, he had been promised $350 in cash for each fifteenth of an acre that was destroyed — far less than drug smugglers normally paid, but still a tempting deal.

By last week, however, none of the money had reached the poppy farmers in Ziauddin’s village, parched by four years of drought that thirstier crops such as wheat cannot withstand. The villagers vowed angrily that if they are not paid soon, they will start growing poppies again.

“We know poppy causes problems for people in other parts of the world, and we would not grow it if we had water,” Ziauddin said. “Every time we go to the city for our money, they tell us to come back later ... This is our livelihood. Soon we will have no choice but to plant.”

The frustration expressed by Ziauddin and his neighbours is the unintended fallout from an internationally backed effort to eradicate poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, which produces about 75 per cent of the opium used for making heroin worldwide. Repeatedly undermined by a variety of problems, including subterfuge and sabotage by growers, logistical delays, political rivalries and physical violence, the ambitious three-month effort ended recently with only 25 per cent of the crop destroyed and the rest making its way through the illegal pipeline to addicts in the West.

Poppy cultivation peaked in 1999, with 225,000 acres sown and 5,050 tons of opium produced, while most of Afghanistan was ruled by the Islamic Taliban movement. But the Taliban suddenly banned the crop and succeeded in virtually wiping it out, with only 19,000 acres grown last year, according to the UN Drug Control Programme.

As a short-term incentive, the British government offered to subsidize farmers who agreed to destroy their plants. Most of the heroin consumed in Britain originates in Afghanistan. Other donors promised longer-term projects to dig wells and irrigation canals so farmers could switch back to edible crops.

Eradication began in April, and one of its major targets was here in Nangahar province, a rich agricultural region in eastern Afghanistan that is a major poppy producer. Abdul Qadir, then the provincial governor, visited numerous villages urging farmers to comply, but last month he was assassinated in Kabul, where he had just been named a vice president.

“He asked us not to grow poppy, and we told him we had no water to grow anything else. He promised to bring us water, and because we respected him as an elder, we obeyed,” said Sahar Gul, 80, a farmer in Qadir’s native Sukh Rod district. “Two or three days later, he was killed. Now we don’t know whether we will get water or not.”

But the anti-poppy drive in Nangahar was plagued by other problems long before Qadir’s death. In Shinwar district, mobs of angry farmers blocked the roads to prevent eradication teams from proceeding. In Chaparhar and other districts, officials said some farmers claimed their poppy fields were far larger than government surveys showed, and others harvested early to beat the eradication deadline.

According to a British official who worked with the programme, government videotapes of workers chopping down poppy plants showed farmers in the background, frantically slitting poppy bulbs to obtain as much opium sap as possible before the plants were crushed.

“They wanted to have their cake and eat it too,” said the official, adding that Qadir’s personal eradication drive was conducted without the necessary supervision, leaving many crop areas unsurveyed and proper payment virtually impossible to calculate. “Everything went out of control,” he said.

By last month, workers had chopped down more than 41,000 acres of plants in Nangahar and the other principal growing regions, and at least $11 million had been doled out to complying farmers in Nangahar alone.

But officials stopped the eradication programme with only a little over 25 per cent of the crop destroyed. They also suspended the delivery of payments in areas where they suspected farmers had inflated their crop size or harvested early, and where disputes had arisen over the proper payment.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post