AFP/Kabul
Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased by 18% this year, sending a “serious alarm signal” from the world’s biggest opium producer, the United Nations said yesterday.
Estimated opium production in the war-torn country fell 36% because of blight and bad weather. But the area under poppies rose despite tougher eradication efforts, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its annual report.
While farm-gate prices for opium remained relatively high at $196 per kilo, the value of opium produced was halved to $700mn, dropping from the equivalent of 7% of GDP in 2011 to 4% in 2012.
Afghanistan produces about 90% of the world’s opium, and poppy farmers are taxed by Taliban militants who use the cash to help fund their insurgency against the government and Nato forces.
“Insecurity is the main cause for the rise in opium cultivation,” Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics minister Zarar Ahmad Moqbel told a news conference in Kabul.
More than a hundred members of the Afghan security forces were killed in the process of destroying poppy fields this year, he said.
“An increase of 18% is a serious alarm signal, it’s a wake-up call,” said UNDOC Afghanistan representative Jean Luc Leahieu. “The gains made in the last years have been undone.”
High opium prices were blamed for playing a major role in the increased area under cultivation.
High prices would also “provide a strong incentive for farmers to start or resume poppy cultivation in the coming season”, the survey said.
UNODC executive director Yury Fedotov called for “sustained effort by the Afghan government and international stakeholders to address illicit cultivation with a balanced approach of development and law enforcement measures”.
The report shows that cultivation increased despite “a significant 154% increase in government eradication efforts,” with nearly 10,000 hectares of poppy wiped out.
Most poppy cultivation – 95% — was concentrated in the southern and western provinces hardest hit by insecurity and organised crime.
The Taliban make at least $100mn a year from taxing Afghanistan’s opium trade, officials say.
Wiping out the crop has been part of efforts to stabilise Afghanistan since the Islamists’ regime was ousted by a US-led invasion in 2001.
The poppies, which provide rich pickings in one of the world’s poorest countries, also play a large part in the corruption that plagues Afghan life at every level, from district to national government.
With so many people profiting from poppies on both sides of the war, efforts to wean farmers off a crop that gives them an income several times higher than mainstream produce have proved difficult.
And with Nato due to pull its combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014, there are concerns that opium production could rise even further.
In this file photograph taken April 25, 2011 eight-year old Mohamed Bayan harvests opium poppies at his family’s field at Maranjan Village in Helmand
