Help us keep Afghanistan poppy-free, Afghan ambassador asks

Omar Samad said there are about 20 provinces now in the North, East, Northeast and Central regions of the country that are considered poppy-free. This is up from 16 this time last year.

"When the province goes poppy-free and there are forces that want to reverse this trend, the government and the international community needs to step in, and they need to provide incentives and rewards in some ways to the farmers and to those who are keeping the province free of poppies."

Poppies are used to produce heroin that is sold to the international community. The Taliban profits from those sales to fund their insurgency against Canada and other NATO allies in Afghanistan. Farmers are paid about $10 a day to harvest the poppies.

Many of the poppy fields under Taliban control are in the south of Afghanistan where Canadians have spear-headed the fight against an insurgency.

Incentives that might lead to a decline in the poppy crop "doesn't mean cash, per se," the ambassador said.

"It could mean rural development, it could mean clinics, it could mean roads, it could mean providing them with agricultural machinery and so on and so forth."

Samad does admit that there is always a risk that those losing money from the banned poppy harvest could be swayed to the join the Taliban if they are promised income.

"But the history in the past two or three years in most of these provinces shows that there is very strong, popular support, even amongst farmers, for not resorting to poppy cultivation."

Earlier this month, the ambassador told the a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan that his country aims to increase the number of poppy-free provinces and reduce the poppy growing fields by a minimum of 25 per cent throughout 2008 and 2009.

Increasing security, better governance and implementing a program designed to help affected farmers with items like alternative livelihoods and rural development are the key ways to put an end to poppy production, according to Samad.

However, this is not going to be a quick fix, he says.

"I think that all of these measures will take ten years to make a difference."

The increasing price for wheat may also end up being a boost to efforts to reduce poppy production. Farmer in some parts of Afghanistan are planting more wheat to take advantage of higher demand and rapidly rising prices.

Tens of thousands of Afghans have been toiling in bone dry, 40 C heat for the last few weeks to bring in the poppy harvest, expected to be the largest in southern Afghanistan in living memory. The picking, all done by hand, is expected to go on for another two or three weeks.

What comes after that is what worries NATO commanders in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two biggest poppy producing regions in the country.

Once unemployed, those thousands of mostly illiterate field hands become a deep recruiting pool for the Taliban. Often they are bought off with money made in large part from the spoils of refining poppies into opium and heroin for the illicit drug trade.