KABUL - Afghanistan's plan to stamp out cultivation of the opium poppy is back on track after several protests by farmers in major growing regions against what they called inadequate compensation, officials said on Sunday.

The United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) says poppy growing in war-torn Afghanistan boomed after the ouster of the Taliban, which banned the crop in 2000.

Abdur Razaaq, deputy head of the anti-drug commission, also said the government plans to establish a rapid reaction force against drug trafficking in a country which once supplied 70 percent of the world's opium, from which heroin is derived.

He said about 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of poppies nearly ready for the milking of sap, which hardens into opium, had been destroyed in the arid southern Province of Helmand, Afghanistan's biggest growing region.

The destruction plan there was halted last week after two workers were killed when their tractors hit landmines which local officials alleged farmers had planted to protect their crops.

Eight farmers were killed in Helmand during a protest against the plan to destroy ripening poppies before it went into effect.

Razaaq said he did not have figures for the region around the eastern city of Jalalabad, where farmers blocked the highway to Pakistan for two days this month and stoned vehicles in protest against the government's plan to destroy their poppies.

Linked to it may have been an attempt to assassinate Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim in Jalalabad on the day the eradication program started last Wednesday, when a bomb killed five people in the city center as he drove by unhurt, officials say.

The protests resulted in the government raising its compensation offer $100 to $350 an acre and razaak said all was now going smoothly.

"There is no halt, blockade or interruption," Razaaq told Reuters.

"A special commission has been formed to implement the ban and also to establish a rapid reaction force comprising the police, armed forces and security," he said.

"This rapid reaction force will be sent from Kabul when required," Razaaq said, adding that international donors would be asked to fund it.