950828

Iran buys wheat

to lure Afghan

farmers from opium

NICOSIA: Iran is trying to stop drug trafficking by buying wheat at high prices from farmers in neighbouring Afghanistan to encourage them to grow the crop instead of opium, an Iranian official said.

Mohammad Fallah, secretary of Iran's anti-drug campaign, said in an interview with Iran News that farmers in Afghanistan produced 5,000 tonnes of opium annually.

A United Nations Drug Control Programme survey says Afghanistan produces more opium than any other country, much of it in remote tribal regions close to the border with Iran.

Fallah said Iran's President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani "made public a sweeping plan through which he offered attractive and useful incentives to the Afghan farmers for substitute farming. "As an incentive to Afghan farmers to produce wheat instead of opium...Rafsanjani has offered to purchase wheat from Afghan farmers..." at triple the price of "their Iranian counterparts. "Actually, the plan is currently being implemented in Afghanistan's Herat province..." Fallah said in the interview, quoted by the Iran news agency IRNA.

Iran set up the campaign in 1988 to fight drug use and trafficking. Fallah said Iranian authorities confiscated 25 tonnes of morphine destined for Europe last year. He said Iran has about 500,000 drug addicts compared to more than two million before the 1979 Islamic revolution.-Reuter