"The Karzai government doesn't give the money to poor farmers growing poppy.
In the south and west, where security is worst, 100percentt of studied villages that had poor security cultivated poppies, the report said.
Ideally, officials say, eradication efforts would focus on wealthy landowners growing poppy, not poor farmers.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan started out poor, heavily reliant on poppy production.
The government, Mr. Boonwaat said, also saw that opium did little to help poor farmers who grew poppies.
Ninety percent of villages in the south with poor security are involved in poppy cultivation, the report said.
The multibillion-dollar Mexican opium trade starts here, with poppy farmers so poor they live in wood-plank, tin-roofed shacks with no indoor plumbing.
On the eastern border, hundreds of poppy growers, mostly poor and indebted farmers who work small plots, stopped virtually all traffic entering the country from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass, pelting the few passing cars with stones.
Even when the United States admitted that it probably had to "do" them, the focus was on using Roundup, a herbicide, to destroy the poppy crops of poor farmers rather than going after the smuggling networks and kingpins that sustained the trade and bred militias.
— Poppy thrives in poor soil and Afghan farmers can make up to $10,000 a year per hectare of raw opium, versus $120 per hectare of wheat.
