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With elections in Afghanistan, Business Daily talks to a poppy farmer and to a Western diplomat trying to persuade farmers to turn from the crop. We look at an alternative for one of the world's poorest countries - might it be saffron?

Afghanistan goes to the polls on Thursday. Something like seventeen million people will get the chance to elect the president for only the second time ever. It is, of course, a desperately poor country with incomes of around $1.50 a day. It's also got all the wrong things for prosperity, particularly war. It's arid and land-locked and the roads are awful.
But it does have one very lucrative crop - poppies, the raw material for heroin.

The United Nations reckons that households that grow poppies get 50% more cash than do farmers that grow other crops. In Helmand province, where the bulk of the fighting is, a half an acre of poppies yields about $2,000, of which the farmer keeps about $900, the rest going in taxes, either formal ones or corrupt payments to warlords.

The thing about it is that there's a very high ratio of value to weight - they pack a lot of price for a very small amount. Those who want to wean Afghanistan off poppies are trying to find equally attractive alternatives, and one of those is saffron, the delicate, hyper-pricey stamen of the crocus which gets used in cookery.

The Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees, which has been working in the country since 1984, is trying to persuade farmers to switch. Its director there is Arif Qaraeen.

There's been a debate about how to deal with poppy production. The hard line was until recently that it should simply be eradicated, usually by spraying. That policy has now changed to one with more emphasis on economic incentives to switch to other crops. David Belgrove is a British diplomat who's just returned from his posting in Kabul where he was the British embassy's head of anti-narcotics.

The change in emphasis away from the simple destruction of crops comes partly because of a realisation that destroying crops only alienates farmers. There was also a feeling in Washington that it hadn't worked in South America.

It is very hard to know what tactics work where drugs are concerned, partly because they bring so much money that corruption invariably follows them. Tom Schweich was US President Bush's ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan.