Opium protest closes aid route

Opium farmers in southern and eastern Afghanistan organised angry demonstrations and blockaded a major aid route on Tuesday after at least eight people were killed during government attempts to ban the crop. The deaths occurred on Monday in the southern province of Helm and when the government tried to enforce a decree offering opium farmers a small payment to destroy their valuable crop. The farmers were killed and another 35 wounded after the interim government forces opened fire on protesting farmers in the Kajaki district Helmand - Afghanistan's biggest poppy growing area. Parts of the major international road connecting Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan and the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad were closed by protesting farmers on Tuesday. The blockade also prevented aid convoys and returning refugees from reaching Jalalabad. Some convoys were forced to turn back to Torkham. Yussuf Hassan of the UN's refugee agency UNHCR said 700 vehicles and 14,000 refugees were stranded on the road after cars and lorries were pelted with rocks and stones by angry farmers. Speaking in Peshawar, Haibat Shah a 25-year-old farmer from Momandara district in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar told IRIN that the protesting farmers had blocked two kilometres of Torkham to Jalalabad road from Battikot to Barco, some 15 km west of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border at Torkham. "Farmers are in desperate conditions, on one hand poppy is highly valued earning the farmer much more than any other crop, it's less labour intensive and needs little water," Shah said, adding that for most of the poor Afghan farmers it was the only crop they could survive on. Shah told IRIN that most of the farmers had already taken credits from drug barons and they could not destroy their crops, which would result in financial ruin. "I think the farmers should not be pushed to the wall, poppy for May is the only source of livelihood and they will resist any attempts at destroying that unless they are properly compensated," he said. Last week, Afghanistan's interim government decided to offer farmers US $250 per 2,000 sq mt opium field if they destroyed the crop from which much of Europe and North America's heroin is produced. Kabul has declared the trade illegal on a number of occasions but this is the first time it has acted. With an expected bumper crop, Afghanistan is set to become the world's leading opium producer in 2002. Afghan sources in Peshawar told IRIN that farmers who had cultivated poppy were not satisfied with the payment of US $250 per jerib of cultivated land (one jerib is approximately equal to 2,000 square meters. Instead they were demanding US $1,000 as compensation for giving up their crop. Negotiations between defence minister General Muhammad Fahim and his cabinet colleague Haji Qadeer and tribal elders of the eastern Nangarhar province broke down when the government refused to accept the farmers' demand that security forces leave their current crop or buy all of their product at market prices. Poppy, for many impoverished Afghan farmers, remains the only cash crop promising relatively high income. Fields around Helmand account for more than half of the opium poppy in the country. Other poppy growing areas include the provinces of Kandahar, Nimroz and Uruzgan in the south and southwest. Nangarhar in the east and Badakhshan in the northeast also produce huge quantities of opium and farmers there have again planted the crop. The Taliban government banned poppy cultivation in 2000, but since last September farmers have been replanting for the spring harvest, believing the incoming government would not have the authority to prevent them growing the lucrative crop.