KABUL, 30 August 2005 — The amount of land used for opium cultivation in world’s largest producer country Afghanistan dropped by an estimated 21 percent this year because of a major clampdown on poppy farmers, the United Nations’ anti-drug chief said yesterday. But good rains after years of drought led to bumper harvests from the poppy crops that were grown, so the overall yield of opium dropped by just 2 percent to 4,519 tons, said Antonio Maria Costa, the director for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Last year’s yield was 4,630 tons. Costa said Afghanistan is still estimated to produce 87 percent of the world’s supply of both opium and its derivative, heroin. He predicted it would take 20 years to eradicate the cultivation of drugs — a mainstay of many of Afghanistan’s impoverished farmers, despite government warnings against growing poppies and authorities’ destruction of some crops.
“We see a significant improvement in the amount of land cultivated in Afghanistan, a major reduction. One field out of five that was cultivated in 2004 was not cultivated this year,” Costa, who is currently visiting Afghanistan, told The Associated Press in an interview. But he said that “heavy rainfall, snowfall and no infestation of crops resulted in a very significant increase in productivity.”
A report by the UN agency said the total amount of land being used to grow poppies dropped from 131,000 hectares (323,570 acres) in 2004 to 104,000 hectares (256,880 acres) this year. But the jump in crop yield — the opium harvested from each hectare of poppies — was 22 percent, it added.
The report said drug production in some parts of the country had dropped sharply, but in other areas it had boomed, including in southern Nimroz province where there had been a 1,370 percent hike. The United States, Britain and other countries have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an anti-drug campaign in Afghanistan after opium and heroin production ballooned in recent years, sparking warnings the country was fast becoming a “narco-state” less than four years after the US-led invasion ended its role as a haven for Al-Qaeda.
