Afghan poppies to be sprayed with herbicide: U.S. anti-drug chief

Jason Straziuso
Canadian Press

Sunday, December 10, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The top U.S. anti-drug official said Saturday that Afghan poppies will be sprayed with herbicide to combat an opium trade that produced a record heroin haul this year, a measure likely to anger farmers and scare Afghans unfamiliar with weed-killers.

John Walters, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said Afghanistan could turn into a narco-state unless "giant steps" are made toward eliminating poppy cultivation.

"We cannot fail in this mission," he said.

"Proceeds from opium production feed the insurgency and burden Afghanistan's nascent political institutions with the scourge of corruption."

Afghans are deeply opposed to spraying poppies. After nearly three decades of war, western science and assurances can do little to assuage their fears of chemicals being dropped from airplanes. Because of those fears - and because crop-dusters could be shot down by insurgents - spraying would need to be done on the ground.

The Afghan government has not publicly said it will spray and President Hamid Karzai has said in the past herbicides pose too big a risk, contaminating water and killing the produce that grows alongside poppies.

But Walters said Karzai and other officials have agreed to ground spraying.

"I think the president has said yes and I think some of the ministers have repeated yes," Walters said without specifying when spraying would start.

"The particulars of the application have not been decided yet but yes the goal is to carry out ground spraying."

Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan's deputy minister for counter-narcotics, said the government hadn't made any decisions yet. But a top Afghan official close to Karzai said the issue is being looked at closely.

"We are thinking about it; we are looking into it. We're just trying to see how the procedure will go," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Opium production in Afghanistan this year rose by 49 per cent to 6,078 tonnes - enough to make about 600 tonnes of heroin. That's more than 90 per cent of the world's supply and more than the world's addicts consume in a year.

A U.S. official who asked not to be named said last month if Afghans don't spray in 2007 "there's going to be a lot of pressure on the government for spraying...a lot of pressure from the U.S."

At the news conference Saturday, Walters tried to emphasize to the largely Afghan media members in attendance spraying is perfectly safe. He said the herbicide glyphosate - sold commercially in the United States under the name Roundup - would be used and it is a safe and common weed killer.

He said the U.S. uses glyphosate to spray marijuana plants in Hawaii and it's also used against coca plants in Colombia.

"We are not experimenting on the people of Afghanistan," he said.

"We are not using a chemical that has a history of questionable effects on the environment."

Walters said he doesn't expect the fight against poppies "to be a one-year success story."

A recent UN report said it would take a generation - 20 years - to defeat the drug trade in Afghanistan.

© The Canadian Press 2006