British Taxpayers Cough Up £6m to Subsidise Afghan Drug Farmers

[Trevortt]

Douglas Alexander, Labour’s International Development Secretary, will announce this week that the “Government” (i.e. British taxpayers) is to pour in excess of £6 million into Afghanistan to “encourage farmers to switch from poppy cultivation to wheat.”

Ministers are to launch a campaign to persuade 26,000 farmers each to grow a hectare (2½ acres) of wheat in place of poppies, to cut heroin trade and address food shortages.

Afghanistan is facing a food crisis this autumn as a drought combined with soaring food prices has led to shortages and hunger. Alexander will say that the British taxpayer-funded Department for International Development (DfID) is donating £2 million to the governor of Helmand’s short-term counter-narcotics plan, which is also backed by the British taxpayer-funded “Civil-Military Mission to Helmand,” which is providing a further £2.125million, and the US Agency for International Development.

Wheat seed, fertiliser and expert advice will be given to farmers. The plan covers more than 37,000 acres of farmland. In dangerous areas where the insurgents are still active, farmers will be able to collect seeds from British military bases but not fertiliser, which could be used on poppies.

In the rest of Afghanistan, farmers will be offered vouchers to buy subsidised seed, fertiliser and tools. The DfID is providing a further £2million for this project.

New figures from the United Nations to be released this week are set to reveal that opium production in the southern regions of Afghanistan has soared. The worst affected province is Helmand, where 7,000 British soldiers are deployed.

In the 2006-2007 season, Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium, a record. A second worrying development is the growing ‘professionalisation’ of local drugs production, with mobile laboratories increasingly manufacturing high-quality heroin within Afghanistan.

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