Heroin Poppy crops growing in England

British troops are fighting a ferocious and often lethal war in Afghanistan, to eradicate the country's opium poppy crop while large swathes of the English countryside are being turned over to the very same crop - with the full backing of the Government.

Farmers are cultivating the poppies to combat a critical shortage of morphine in NHS hospitals, and are finding it a lucrative crop.

In the UK, the Home Office has granted pharmaceutical company Macfarlan Smith a licence to harvest the poppies, and now they are being grown in dozens of farms across Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.

The move aims to ease the severe lack of diamorphine that has hit the NHS, and the rest of the world, for several years.

Guy Hildred has dedicated more than 100 acres of his farm near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, to poppies. He said: "It is worthwhile from a farmer's point of view and it's an expanding market."

Cultivation of the crop for legal means has expanded rapidly in Britain since trials began six years ago - but the global morphine shortage is so severe that Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown has raised the possibility of legalising opium growing in Afghanistan.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: "The poppies in question, Papaver somniferum, can be grown without a licence. The extraction of the drugs is a complex industrial process and the people who work to produce the drugs have to be licensed.

"In addition, the Home Office receives information about where the poppy farmers are and how much they are growing from the pharmaceutical companies. We then send growers a letter that they are encouraged to show to local police to make them aware of their activities."