editorial comment collateral damages.....

HAKIMABAD: Instead of the handful of people with skin diseases he usually deals with, Dr. Mohammed Rafi Safi says he has recently treated 30 Afghan farmers who allege their opium crops were sprayed with poison.
The flood of patients in the past two weeks has come since farmers in part of eastern Nangarhar province alleged their opium poppies were sprayed with poison from the air earlier this month, destroying food crops and leaving many feeling ill.

"Other illnesses such as eye and respiratory problems have also increased," said the doctor at the 20-bed Khogyani District Hospital.

The Afghan government on November 18 launched a probe into claims unidentified foreign troops sprayed fields in Hakimabad and neighboring villages in Khogyani, Shinwar and Achin districts, in one of the country's biggest poppy-growing regions.

The US military has denied any involvement, although the United States has indicated it intends to take a tougher stance in future against the drug trade in the war-torn country.

"US troops are not involved are not involved in eradication, which would include the spraying of poppy fields which we do not do," US military spokesman Major Mark McCann was quoted as saying by AFP last week.

But Nangarhar provincial governor Din Mohammed said there was "no doubt that an aerial spray has taken place."

"I don't know who might be behind this but you know the fact that the airspace of Afghanistan is under the control of the United States," he added.

Opium production in the country leapt by 64 percent in 2004 from the year before, according to a United Nations report released last week. Afghanistan now produces more than 70 percent of the world's opium and heroin and 90 percent of the heroin on Europe's streets, it said.

Hazrat Mir, a farmer in Hakimabad village, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the provincial capital Jalalabad, told AFP: "I got this sickness when I touched the chemicals sprayed from the air on our fields."

"My back, my arms and my legs, my entire body aches -- it is very hard," the 38-year-old said as he queued at the only hospital in the village to get free treatment.

Villagers said they became sick after a plane sprayed chemicals on their fields, destroying not only poppies but also fruit and vegetables.

"I got this disease after I touched the spinach plants in our fields," said a burqa-clad woman named Kamina, while displaying her bony hands to a doctor in the hospital.

In the fields angry farmers pointed to ruined crops.

"See here," Abdul Qadir said furiously, pointing to a wilting green onion patch next to a poppy field where the shoots of the coming year's opium crop were also dying.

"The onions are destroyed, the spinach is destroyed, the wheat and vegetables are destroyed," he said.

Fellow villager Zarawar Khan claimed to have seen "a huge plane flying very low" overhead spraying a snow-like substance on the fields.

"I saw the plane. They sprayed this thing on the fields," he said, putting his finger on a sticky substance which was slightly lighter than the earth around the seedlings.

A team of experts dispatched from Kabul on November 16 has completed investigations in the three districts and has taken crops samples to the capital to be analysed.

Villager Khan said he had voted for President Hamid Karzai in the country's October 9 presidential election, but was disappointed.

"We voted for Karzai in the elections to rebuild us but he destroys us," he said.

His comments highlight the dilemma Karzai faces in stamping out the drugs trade, which generates two-thirds of the country's gross domestic product and employs an estimated 2.3 million-plus farmers, many of whom remain near the poverty line.

Karzai has said stemming the trade would be a top priority for his government and that he intended to prevent the country becoming a "narco-state".

But farmers desperate for cash to fund house repairs or their children's education can make 10 times more money growing drugs than other cash crops, while there are few roads to transport other goods.

Foreign aid workers said eradication drives such as crop spraying were only likely to drive opium prices higher by lowering yields -- putting more money in the hands of dealers and traders and hitting impoverished farmers at the bottom of the chain the hardest.

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