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Columbia Missourian

Replanting Afghanistan

By GRANT SMITH
September 21, 2007 | 5:16 p.m. CDT

More than 50 members of the Missouri National Guard are hoping to create alternatives for Afghan farmers to growing opium poppies.

Afghan farmers have produced 193,000 hectares of opium poppies in 2007. Except for 19th-century China, whose population was 15 times larger than that of present-day Afghanistan, no other country has produced as much narcotics.   ¦  

The world’s largest producer of opium expanded poppy production by nearly 60 percent last year and generated about $3 billion of illicit economic activity in Afghanistan.

The Missouri National Guard wants to change that by ending Afghan farmers’ dependence on the poppy crop and transforming legal agriculture into a profitable alternative.

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