An Afghan worker inspects grapes at the Badam Bagh farm in Kabul on Oct. 26, 2009. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)

The U.S. plans to donate up to $20 million to Afghanistan’s Agriculture Ministry to improve its capacity to deliver services to the local farmers. According to a report from the Associated Press, the intention behind the program is to help the country to continue to switch from opium production to cultivation of legal crops like grapes or corn.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the plan on Tuesday after a three-day visit to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is the biggest opium exporter in the world, covering as much as 90 percent of the worldwide demand for this drug, used in the production of heroine.

Groups like the Taliban use the money from illegal drug trafficking to finance their operations. The group, leading guerrilla warfare against the U.S-led invasion in country, provides numerous services to farmers—futures contracts, guaranteed marketing, financing, seeds, and fertilizers.

Secretary Vilsack, who has visited Afghanistan six times, told the Associated Press in Kabul that they have to provide a counteroffer to the Afghans' farmers, who are reportedly earning five times more money from poppy than wheat from fields of the same size.

Before the war, Afghanistan used to export dried fruits, nuts, and pomegranates, but the industry was largely devastated. Many of the farmers now rely on poppy production for their income.

Afghan agriculture reform is a part of the Obama administration’s efforts to stabilize the country. Mr. Vilsack told AP that due to the incentives offered in 2009—wheat seeds and fertilizer for low prices—poppy crops were reduced by one third in the southern Helmand Province, a main center for opium production.

This year’s plan is to diversify agriculture by extending the support to nut trees, fruit, and vegetables.

According to a recent report from the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, the essential condition for implementing counter-narcotics policies is “a state that works.” But in most of Afghanistan, “the state is only one of several contending authorities there, and its reach is particularly weak in areas where opium production is concentrated.”

The analysis suggests that to ask farmers for voluntary restraint, much larger development livelihood programs should be delivered—and not just announced or funded or launched—to all farmers, especially in the provinces that are not planting poppy or are reducing it.

The Seattle based National Bureau of Asian Research says in a report that “a multitude of actors are involved in Afghanistan’s opium poppy production, including the Taliban, all levels of the Afghan government, law enforcement, unofficial powerbrokers, and tribal elites.”

The study suggests that an alternative legal economy should be in place, which cannot consist of a mono-cropping system, but that the sustainable legal livelihoods need to include “high-value, labor-intensive, diversified crops, such as fruits and vegetables.”