Alliance For democracy In Iran

Please have a look at my other weblog, Iran Democracy - http://irandemocray.blogspot.com/

IMPERIAL EMBLEM

IMPERIAL EMBLEM
PERSIA

Shahanshah Aryameher

S U N OF P E R S I A

Iranian Freedom Fighters UNITE

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Britain's New Afghanistan Plan - Pay Farmers To Ditch Opium - 2007-11-10 Intellpuke

Troops may target drug factories as part of new strategy to combat Taliban.British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidize farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energize policy in the conflict the prime minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.
Britain's Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication. Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the World Bank.British and allied forces are also looking at destroying drug factories inside Afghanistan, and a much better-targeted drive against the big traffickers responsible for 90% of the opium which reaches the west. Brown is expected to make a House of Commons statement on security and development in Afghanistan in the next few weeks, and is likely to highlight the strategic importance of the war against the Taliban in his first annual foreign affairs speech at Mansion House on Monday.
The focus on Afghanistan comes as British troop levels there are now higher than in Iraq. There are approximately 7,700 British troops in Afghanistan, compared with around 5,000 in Iraq.
Critics in the British aid agencies claim that too little western aid is set aside to provide alternative livelihoods for opium farmers in Afghanistan, and comparatively too much going on building state structures or funding public sector salaries. Senior British officers believe the Afghan war remains largely misunderstood in Britain, and say security is the precondition for building alternatives to opium production. Lord Malloch-Brown recently returned from Afghanistan to tell peers: "The Department of International Development is looking at whether we can put on a more formal and structured long-term basis what one would controversially describe as an Afghan equivalent of a CAP, with subsidised purchase of legal crops to make returns more like those from poppy." He added: "We have to do a much better job of not targeting the farmers, the producers whose hearts and minds we are trying to win in the counter-insurgency effort. We have to target the industry above that - the financiers, the shippers, the drug big men who are benefiting from the production. We know who they are and the government of Afghanistan know who they are. A system banning them from travel, listing them and freezing their bank accounts, hitting at the industry's infrastructure, strikes me as an area in which more can be done." He pointedly added that only the U.S. favored aerial spraying of opium crops. Illegal Afghan opium was selling for as much as $125 per kilo in 2006. The United Nations said the area under cultivation rose this year from 165,000 to 193,000 hectares and the harvest rose from 6,100 to 8,200 tons. Opium production is heavily concentrated in areas of insecurity, with the British area of responsibility in Helmand now the world's biggest source of illicit drugs. The U.K. has provided $20 million to an Afghan criminal justice task force that has managed to secure only 400 convictions. Some influential figures, including the former Foreign Office permanent secretary Lord Jay, have become so despairing of the fight that they are backing calls for opium to be produced legally and used as medical morphine, but the idea appears to have been rejected. Christian Aid has also called for an aid switch to improving irrigation and water management; achieving food security through expanded cereal production; credit facilities for farmers; and building export markets for fruit and nuts.

No comments: