Afghans to use herbicide on nation's poppy crop
U.S. efforts to quell country's opium boom 'will make the situation worse,' official says
November 28, 2006 - Globe and Mail
TIRIN KOT, AFGHANISTAN — The United States has persuaded Afghanistan to spray herbicide on poppy fields in an effort to slow the country's opium boom, according to a senior Western diplomat.
A security review will be conducted before the plan goes ahead, the diplomat said. But already rumours of chemical eradication are spreading in southern Afghanistan, where many say it would spark a revolt among farmers and put Canadian soldiers at risk.
Afghanistan has not previously tried chemical spraying, as President Hamid Karzai expressed deep misgivings about the effects of herbicides on villagers and legitimate crops.
But U.S. politicians are now encouraging a more aggressive drug policy in Afghanistan, after estimates show this year's opium crop was 59 per cent bigger than the previous year's harvest.
"The assumption here is that this is being pushed by Congress," the Western diplomat in Kabul said. "I suspect the U.S. embassy here is not that excited. They know the drawbacks to eradication in general and spraying in particular."
Those drawbacks are clear to southerners such as Haji Agha Lalai, a provincial council member in Kandahar, whose home district of Panjwai is a major source of opium and a battlefield where Canadian troops regularly fight Taliban insurgents.
"The people will be angry about this spraying, very unhappy," Mr. Lalai said. "It will make the situation worse."
Spokesmen for Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter Narcotics and the Counter Narcotics Police said the government hasn't made any decision about spraying. Privately, one counternarcotics official in the south said he's heard persistent talk of a chemical eradication program but he can't get definite answers from his bosses in Kabul.
No spraying can happen until next year, the narcotics official added, because the poppies planted by farmers this fall won't be vulnerable until their green shoots emerge from the ground in the spring.
In Kabul, a U.S. official denied that any decision has been reached, but confirmed that Americans are talking with their Afghan counterparts about a possible spraying program "on a test basis." The spraying would be conducted by ground vehicles, instead of aircraft, said the U.S. official, adding that NATO and other countries would be consulted before any action.
"We cannot at this point even speculate when, or even if, that decision will be taken," the official said.
The first major poppy-eradication program in Afghanistan was launched by the Taliban in 2000 as the regime imposed a harsh law that dramatically cut production, and raised the cash value of the Taliban's own opium stockpile. Mr. Karzai launched his first eradication campaign in April, 2002, with less success. Provincial governors and district officials usually lead the efforts, which annually destroy a tiny fraction of the crop. The same local politicians are often accused of profiting from the drug trade.
Britain and the United States donate most of the money for eradication programs in Afghanistan, while the United Nations monitors the results. Canada does not participate in eradication, preferring to work on alternative livelihoods for poppy farmers.
A recent report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that Afghanistan's opium crop had grown to 165,000 hectares this year, up from 104,000 last year. This pushed supply above demand by 30 per cent, the report said, although Afghanistan's farmers still earned $750-million (U.S.), making opium the largest sector in the economy.
Foreign advisers in Afghanistan are divided about how to handle the growing drug problem. Drug lords are seen as a source, or conduit, of the money that feeds the insurgency, and opium profits are believed to have corrupted Afghan officials at the highest levels. Still, some prominent analysts say they're convinced that spraying is a mistake.
"News of this year's record crop is likely to increase pressure from the U.S. Congress for eradication, including aerial spraying," Barnett Rubin, author of a recent report on Afghanistan for the U.S.-based non-partisan research centre Council on Foreign Relations, said in testimony to a congressional committee.
"Such a program would be disastrously self-defeating," Mr. Rubin said.
"If we want to succeed in Afghanistan, we have to help the rural poor, which is almost everyone, and isolate the leading traffickers and the corrupt officials who support them."
One landowner from Sangisar, a village west of Kandahar city, said in an interview last week that his workers planted about 10 hectares of poppy on his land this season. Ever year, some districts are visited by Afghan eradication teams that use conventional slash-and-burn methods of destroying poppies, he said, but it's not a serious effort: Any farmer with enough local influence, bribe money or connections in the provincial capital can avoid the authorities.
"If you destroy my poppy, I will not fight you," the landowner said.
"I am a rich man. If somebody promised me the kingdom of America, I would not fight. But the farmers on my land would fight because they are poor."
U.S. contractors working in Afghanistan, such as DynCorp, have experience with spraying herbicides on drug crops. DynCorp aircraft reportedly spray herbicides on coca fields in Colombia, but a report by the international think tank Senlis Council suggests this wasn't effective, damaged the environment and killed the crops that ordinary people need to survive.
"Evidence shows that aerial spraying directly led to an increase in social unrest, instability and violence," says the Senlis report.
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Shop: All-In-One Bags That Don't Suck, Certified Organic All-In-One Grow Bags by Magic Bag, Contam-Resistant All-In-One Grow Bags
veggie
Roker 
Edit 
Reply 
veggie
Lifenergy
despisedicon