Focus on poppy eradication

In a basement snooker hall in eastern Afghanistan, smoke from Halim's hashish cigarette curled around his teenage face as he took leisurely puffs. "You can get any drug here - opium, charas [hashish] and even heroin if you want," the cement seller told IRIN in Jalalabad. The ease of getting drugs and the open nature of their use is a direct result of the boom in drug production, particularly of opium poppies, which the Afghan government is struggling to stamp out. Despite the new government's ban on the cultivation of poppies imposed a year ago, the annual opium crop has rocketed from 185 mt in 2001 when the Taliban cracked down on it, to 3,400 mt last year, according to United Nations figures. While lower than the record of 4,600 mt in 1999, it is still more than enough to prompt the government into adopting strong measures to prevent opium and the heroin processed from it, from flooding world markets. Over recent weeks, armed officials have been visiting growers in Nangarhar Province and its provincial capital, Jalalabad, ordering farmers to uproot the crops they planted in November last year or face heavy fines. But angry poppy growers are refusing, saying they will suffer terribly if they have to grow other crops. In Biyar village, a fertile bowl in the shadow of the Tora Bora Mountains, the villagers are standing firm against the orders. Squatting by a field of sprouting poppies, grower Dilagha told IRIN the drought and low prices for other crops meant he had no option but to continue growing poppies. "Poppy is our only crop and without this we would starve." Last year he made about US $6,500 from the 14 kg of opium sap he extracted from the plants on his land. If he had grown wheat, Dilagha estimates he would have made just US $100 - not even enough to cover his fertiliser and seed costs. He said the villagers had so far blocked tractors of the drug officials from coming into the village, but was not sure they could hold out until the crop was ready in April/May. "Maybe they will come back with helicopters and bombs." When the Taliban got tough on drugs, some families were brought to the brink of starvation, Dilagha said. "Many people suffered badly. There were hardly any weddings. But when we started to grow poppies again there were a thousand weddings," he said, adding that people simply couldn't afford to hold the celebrations before. He said if the farmers had a real alternative crop to grow they would happily stop poppy cultivation. But even compensation for not growing the crop had plummeted from US $350 to US $50 per jirib (about one-fifth of a hectare.) The deputy representative in Afghanistan of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, Adam Bouloukos, told IRIN in the capital, Kabul, that even the government acknowledged that the compensation scheme had been a logistical nightmare to administer and had failed. "Basically it has fallen flat on its face," Bouloukos said, adding that the government was now having to consider a range of other strategies, such as small loans to growers or subsidising other crops to try and encourage the farmers to stop planting poppies. Another tactic was to appeal to people's religious conscience by pointing out how drug production violated the principles of Islam. "All this is still to be decided - nobody is sure about the best way to go about things," he added. Bouloukos pointed out that one of the reasons that poppies appealed to farmers was that they were easy to grow and store. With the country's road and transport infrastructure bombed to pieces, other crops were simply not viable at the moment because of the difficulties of getting them to market. Efforts to actively counter poppy production were hampered by a lack of resources. The country's main anti-drug unit, the counter-narcotics department, had only just got a building for a base in Kabul, Bouloukos said. While President Hamid Karzai wanted the problem eradicated within five years, Bouloukos said poppy production was going to be a long-term issue for the country. However, some farmers have stopped growing the lucrative poppy. At Fathabad, an hour's drive from Jalalabad, Abdul Qayum said his land would remain unplanted this year because the government wouldn't let him grow poppies, and it was too dry for anything else. Even if they could grow another crop, they would not even earn 10 percent of what they could get for poppies, he told IRIN. "Life is very, very difficult, but we have no choice." One of his sons had already joined a village exodus to find work in Pakistan. Across the border, where Abdul Qayum's son has gone, traders in Peshawar's "Smuggler's Bazaar" say the opium trade is booming again. "We can order it by the ton now, or by the truckload," Ghulam Rasul told IRIN, his beringed fingers a testament to his trading success. Back in the Jalalabad snooker hall, Halim said farmers were very poor and he could not blame them for growing poppies. "Planting wheat or other crops will not feed their families and there are no other industries or jobs in factories." For many, growing or using drugs was the only way to make life a little more bearable, he said.