Union-Tribune September 19, 2002 A1  Opium's bounty     Afghan farmers rely on country's only billion-dollar export  By MARCUS STERN Copley News Service GHANI KHEL, Afghanistan – Ghulam Said, a tenant farmer who estimated his age at 75, gave the obvious answer when asked why he scrapes the black sap from poppies and forms it into mounds of opium to be sold on the world market. "We are very poor here," Said said while sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree. "We cannot survive on corn and wheat." Another farmer in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar proudly displayed a kilo-sized cake of opium. Yet another produced two crude tools of the trade: a wooden device to bleed the sap from the poppy's pod and a small trowel to collect the sap after it blackens into opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Said and his neighbors are producers of this impoverished country's only billion-dollar export. Afghanistan provides 70 percent of the world's supply of opium. Most of it is refined into heroin and sold in Europe. Already, the surrounding fields are tilled and ready to be sown in October with a new crop of poppy. Afghanistan also is famous for its hashish, made from marijuana plants grown in nearby mountains. But opium – and the heroin it produces – is, by far, the country's top export. In 2000, the Taliban suppressed poppy cultivation by 96 percent, according to a United Nations study. But the Taliban enforcers weren't around this year, routed by the U.S.-led war on terrorism. That military success might have had one unintended consequence: this year's large opium harvest. The new Afghan government made a concerted effort to curtail opium production. Newly installed officials banned it in January and launched an eradication program in April. President Hamid Karzai proclaimed his government was "determined like hell to fight the cultivation of poppy." Almost everyone agrees Karzai failed. The United Nations estimated that 225,000 acres of poppy were planted this year and as many as 175,000 acres were harvested. Local farmers said the eradication program was riddled with corruption. Most managed to harvest plenty of opium even though men paid by the government marched through some of their fields destroying the poppy with sticks. The program paid farmers for destroyed crops, but many said local warlords skimmed the payments. In any case, they said, the payment of a few hundred dollars per acre was far less than the $6,600 they could make cultivating one acre with poppy. In the remote, dusty village of Ghani Khel, efforts to stifle the 200-year tradition of opium production triggered a backlash. Farmers protested after some of their crops were destroyed under the program, and a raid earlier this year closed the village's bustling opium market. "The jail holds 40 people," Said said. "Two thousand of us went down there and said, 'OK, put us in jail.' " One farmer, who asked not to be identified, said he farms about 200 acres with the help of tenant farmers. While he and his tenants grow legal crops such as rice, wheat and corn, they also sow poppy. He described the process: They plant in October. By February, 4-foot-high poppies paint the fields in rich mixtures of red and white. In March, farmhands use simple, home-fashioned wooden implements to delicately score the pods at night, causing the pink-white sap to seep out. The sap mixes with the air during the night and then dries under the sun into a black, tar-like substance. Workers use a small trowel to scrape off the opium resin from each pod, which can be harvested up to five times. The accumulated opium is formed into mounds held together with the leaves of the poppy plant, which over time dry into a dead, brown protective case for the opium. From there, the opium mounds are taken to local markets and sold. Much of the opium then is refined into heroin in labs in the tribal areas of Afghanistan before beginning the long journey to markets in Europe, a route these days that goes north to Central Asia and then west. During the Taliban's six years in power, it preached that poppy production and opium use were un-Islamic. But only in its sixth and final year in control of Afghanistan did the Taliban actually suppress production. It is widely believed that the Taliban benefited from an informal tax system on the poppy products, and that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters fed their coffers from opium profits. Recent unconfirmed Western intelligence reports say that al-Qaeda leaders are cashing in stashed opium, trading it for gold and transporting the gold to Sudan for safe keeping. The local poppy farmer who asked not to be identified criticized this year's eradication efforts. He was promised $700 an acre not to grow poppy, he said, but he received $168 per acre, with the rest going to a local warlord. While he collected money to allow 42 acres to be destroyed in a nearby village called Kama, he successfully harvested 35 acres in Ghani Khel, making tens of thousands of dollars, he said. The program appears unlikely to deter him or other poppy farmers. He estimated that an acre sown with opium produces 20 times as much cash as an acre sown with corn or wheat, although the labor-intensive nature of collecting the poppy's sap reduces the margin somewhat. Local farmers say they understand that opium and heroin cause problems in other parts of the world, but they say the money is a key to survival here, where the water tables have dropped because of a lack of rain over six years. Poppies grow well in dry soil. "I understand it's a crime," Said said. "But the water is gone and there is no support from the government. So what are we to do?" Many simply don't see it as wrong. "I am not a drug dealer. I am a farmer," one man said. Previous stories from this series are available online at SignOnSanDiego, the Union-Tribune's Web site, at www.uniontrib.com.