Opium cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22 per cent this year as prices for the drug tumbled causing farmers to switch to other crops, the United Nations said today.
Some 800,000 fewer Afghans are involved in the illegal drugs trade compared to last year, according to an annual UN report, a rare bit of good news for Western efforts in the country, where an eight-year-old war against the Taliban is at its most violent.
Western officials say the illegal narcotics trade funds the insurgency, fuels rampant corruption and crime, and undermines the Afghan state they are trying to prop up.
Afghanistan has long been the producer of about 90 per cent of the world's opium, a thick paste from poppy that is processed to make heroin. In 2007, it broke all records, but cultivation has since started to decline.
"The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. These results are a welcome piece of good news and demonstrate that progress is possible," said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa in the report issued today.
This year, 123,000 hectares were used to grow opium poppy, compared to 157,000 hectares in 2008, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said.
Most of the reduction took place in the country's most violent province, Helmand, the opium growing heartland and main focus of US and British war efforts. Cultivation there fell by a third to 69,833 hectares, from 103,590 hectares in 2008.
Despite cultivating just 78 per cent as much land, Afghan poppy farmers still produced 90 per cent as much opium as last year, because of record yields caused in part by good weather.
The 6,900 tonnes of opium Afghanistan produced is far more than the 5,000 tonnes the world's addicts consume, leading to a glut that has depressed prices to lows unseen since the 1990s.
"All of that has created stocks, an excess supply, and on the whole has driven conditions such that it has become less and less attractive for farmers to cultivate opium," Mr Costa said.
Reuters