U.N.: Opium farming slows in Afghanistan
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-03-28 09:38

Afghan farmers are growing less opium this year because of a government ban and fear that their crops will be destroyed in an internationally sponsored crackdown, according to a U.N. report released Sunday.

Afghan officials said the eradication drive would begin within days, but warned that more international aid was needed to uproot the world's largest illegal narcotics industry.

A police official holds poppy flowers in his hands while keeping guard over others who were eradicating poppy fields near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar in this April 10, 2004 file photo. In war-battered Afghanistan, finding heroin -- a derivative of opium, the country's main cash crop -- is both cheap and easy.[Reuters]

Opium production has boomed since the fall of the Taliban, sparking warnings that Afghanistan is becoming a "narco-state" just three years after U.S. forces ousted the Taliban. Drug money equals 40 percent of legal national income.

"I know it's an illicit economy," counternarcotics minister Habibullah Qaderi said. "But for the time being, Afghanistan is trying to recover from all the problems of these so many years."

He said hundreds of millions of dollars pledged by the United States, Britain and the European Union to help farmers switch to legal crops were insufficient to offset the blow eradication would deliver to the economy.

"I think we have to do much more than that," Qaderi said at a news conference presenting the report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

An Afghan soldier shows how to harvest opium from poppy bulbs in a poppy field. Afghanistan will step up the fight against drugs in coming months, the government said in a statement after a UN agency said the country was poised to become a narco-state. [AFP/File]

The report made no precise forecasts but said the trend was down in all but five of the country's 34 provinces because farmers had sown fewer opium poppies, which produce the raw material for heroin.

Last year, cultivation reached a record 323,700 acres and yielded nearly 90 percent of the world's opium.

Under international pressure, President Hamid Karzai has called for a "holy war" on drug production, while urging foreign donors to be generous with aid to Afghan farmers so they can survive on less lucrative but legal crops.

The United States, Britain and France also are training special police and paramilitary units to destroy crops and laboratories and arrest traffickers, and are funding a special court and jail for drug lords.

Lt. Gen. Mohammed Daoud, a deputy interior minister, said the eradication effort would begin in earnest next week in southern Kandahar, one of the provinces where cultivation has increased.

A 300-member force, equipped with tractors paid for by the American government, will carry out the work, before shifting their focus to neighboring Helmand and provinces in the north, Daoud said in an interview Sunday.

He also said police seized nearly four tons of opium in three recent raids in the south and that high-profile arrests would follow.

"We have a lot of lists" of suspects, Daoud said. "But lists don't put anybody in jail, so we still need to gather evidence."

The U.N. report said the reinforced ban as well as fear of eradication were the main reasons for this year's decline. Low opium yields and higher wheat prices were also a factor for farmers interviewed in 225 villages across the country in January, it said.

Afghan officials have forecast that cultivation will drop at least 30 percent this year, though some observers suggest traffickers and landowners have gone along with the ban to force up prices depressed by years of glut, and that production will then revive.

Qaderi declined to predict whether the decrease would continue in 2006.

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