Ashraf Ghani, a senior adviser to Hamid Karzai, the chairman of the interim government, said that agents of the Afghan government would fan out across three Afghan provinces thought to produce about 90 percent of the country's opium.

The undisclosed cost will be borne by the United States, Britain and other Western countries, which have been pressuring the Afghan government to crack down on poppy production. In recent months, there have been some suggestions that Western nations would condition aid pledged to Afghanistan on efforts by the Karzai government to attack poppy cultivation. Mr. Ghani said this was not the case.

Under the plan, the Afghan officials will offer poppy farmers around $500 per acre to destroy their plants. If the farmers refuse, Mr. Ghani said, the officials will destroy the crops anyway.

The initiative represents a last-ditch effort to forestall a big comeback for poppy production in Afghanistan, which had become the world's largest supplier of opium until the then-ruling Taliban cracked down on production, which led to a sharply reduced harvest last year.

After the collapse of the Taliban in the fall, many of the farmers who had successfully cultivated poppies rushed to plant again, and this year's crop is now expected to be as large as some of those in the mid or late 1990's, when the Taliban was encouraging poppy production, apparently to raise money.

The initiative announced today is designed to blunt the economic impact of curtailing the crop. One proposal is to provide jobs for farm laborers who would ordinarily harvest the poppies.

Racing to beat the harvest, which would otherwise begin within weeks, government officials will begin handing out cash later this month in Badakshan Province in eastern Afghanistan, Helmand Province in the south and Nangarhar in the northeast, the three centers of poppy production here. The payments, which will be made on the spot, are designed to pay the farmer slightly more than what he would have made had he grown wheat, not opium poppies.

The initiative raises the possibility of a confrontation between the fledgling government and the poppy farmers, who are known for their sometimes violent resistance to attempts to prevent them from growing their prized crops.

Still, Mr. Ghani said that if the farmers refused to destroy their crops, the government was prepared to do the job for them. ``State power is based on the legitimate use of force,'' Mr. Ghani said. ``We hope it doesn't reach that point.''

In impoverished, drought-stricken Afghanistan, the crop has proved to be one of the few reliable sources of a decent income. Poppies also use far less water than wheat or corn.

For all these reasons, Western officials have largely abandoned hopes of eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop this year. Even so, Mr. Ghani and Yunus Qanooni, the interior minister, said that the Karzai government was determined to eliminate poppy farming as a viable occupation. In a decree signed by Mr. Karzai earlier this week, the repayment of loans in opium was prohibited. The practice is widespread among poppy farmers and effectively imposes interest rates of as much as 500 percent per year on the farmer. Mr. Karzai also ordered the closing of opium shops.

Source: New York Times (NY)
Author: Dexter Filkins
Published: April 5, 2002
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact: letters@nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/

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Could it be...to create the unnatural beast known as "sheeple?"

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Another good idea was carpet bombing Afghanistan. I'm sure their soil will benefit from all that extra Nitrogen!

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