U.S. to shift Afghanistan drug policy

TRIESTE, Italy, June 27 (UPI) -- The United States will shift its policies in Afghanistan away from poppy eradication to legal crop development, a top U.S. envoy said Saturday.

Speaking at an international conference in Trieste, Italy, Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, confirmed the United States would stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ineffective efforts to eradicate poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, Financial Times reported.

Instead, Franco Frattini, Italy's foreign minister who led the conference, quoted Holbrooke as saying U.S. forces would redeploy the funds to promote the production of legal crops as part of a "Green Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan supported by the United Nations.

The newspaper said Holbrooke told the U.S. Congress this week the eradication policy has been "totally ineffectual" and actually has helped generate sympathy for the Taliban.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said opium production in Afghanistan, which produces 90 percent of the world's opiates, is concentrated in five southern provinces controlled by Taliban insurgents, Financial Times reported.