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Afghan Farmers: Why We Grow It
Monday, November 26, 2001
The Associated Press

A farmer harvests opium in Chapliar, 25 miles from Jalalabad, in this photo from February 1997.
Photo Credit: The Associated Press.

The 75-year-old Haidar, who lives in a mud house, has rented his 750 acres from a wealthy Afghan for the past half-century.

Gul Haidar smiled as he sifted some seeds through his fingers, happy he had planted the one crop that should ensure his family's welfare next year - opium poppies.

In pencil-thin, spiraling furrows dug with a homemade plow pulled by oxen, Haidar has sown the tiny, pale specks that will yield flowers in four months. When the petals fall, buyers will come for the seed pods and its opium resin.

The Pashto-speaking farmer expects to triple what he had made from the winter wheat he had planted the last three seasons.

With the Taliban no longer around to enforce a three-year ban on poppy-growing, hundreds of farmers near the eastern city of Jalalabad - their appetite for profit sharpened by years of drought and hardship - have resumed planting what they call "narcotic."
(More: CBSNews.com News Source)
2001 © The Associated Press.

Dan