Afghans may reconsider stance on poppy-spraying
KABUL, Afghanistan - In the face of pressure from the American government, the administration of President Hamid Karzai is seeking the formation of an international scientific committee to review the safety of chemical herbicides to combat Afghanistan's opium poppy crop, Afghan and Western officials say.
The Afghan government also has formed two committees to study the issue and, with a new growing season beginning this month, has vowed to conduct a speedy review process, Afghan officials said. "We are working around the clock," Obaidullah Ramin, Afghanistan's minister of agriculture, irrigation, and livestock, said in an interview last week.
The moves, which follow a visit to Kabul earlier this month by a State Department delegation that briefed Afghan Cabinet officials on the efficacy and safety of the chemicals, suggest a new willingness on the part of the Afghan government to reconsider its opposition to chemical eradication.
Since the beginning of the year, the Karzai administration has said it is adamantly opposed to using chemical herbicides to eradicate poppy fields. But in recent weeks, the American government has renewed its pressure on Afghans to endorse at least a trial ground-based spray program using glyphosate, a widely sold weed-killer that has also been used in American-financed counternarcotics programs in the Andes and elsewhere.
The Karzai administration has been reluctant, in part, because of concerns about the possible environmental and public health consequences. Afghan officials have also argued that a program with American-financed chemical eradication squads wiping out farmers' livelihoods would hand the Taliban rebels a major propaganda tool and risk driving farming communities into the insurgency's camp.
"We have no questions about its efficacy as a herbicide," Faizullah Kakar, the Public Health Ministry's deputy minister for technical affairs, said of glyphosate. "The issue is the health impacts and the social and political impacts."
Kakar and Ramin have been among the Karzai administration's biggest critics of chemical eradication. Western officials say endorsements by the two men would be critical in persuading the entire Afghan government to approve spraying.
Kakar, who received advanced degrees in toxicology and epidemiology in the United States, said in an interview last week that while living in the United States, he had used glyphosate to kill weeds in his yard.
But in the United States, he pointed out, the water supply is better protected and regulated. "In Afghanistan that's not the case," he said. Glyphosate "can run into ditches and run into rivers and that's the water that the whole population is using." Kakar also said he had encountered some findings that suggested there might be a link between glyphosate and health problems.
American officials in Kabul and Washington said the State Department was assembling a list of candidates for an international committee. "Our goal is to very quickly pull this together," a State Department official in Washington said by phone on Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the topic.
