KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s opium production has doubled in two years, reaching a new high in 2007, with the country almost the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug, the United Nations announced yesterday.
Production was estimated to have jumped 34 percent this year over last with the number of heroin labs also increasing, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its Annual Opium Survey.
The southern province of Helmand has meanwhile become the world’s biggest source of illicit drugs, surpassing the output of entire countries.
This was despite a multimillion-dollar effort led by Britain and the United States to cut the opium trade, which finances the growing Taliban insurgency that has killed thousands of people, including scores of Western troops.
The production of opium, used to make heroin, had soared to “frightening record levels in 2007,” the UNODC said in a statement on the survey.
The amount of Afghan land used for growing opium was now larger than the combined total used to grow coca — the raw ingredient for cocaine — in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, it said.
The total opium harvest for the year was estimated at 8,200 tons, up from 6,100 tons last year, a 34 percent spike, it said. The harvest normally ends around late July.
The area planted with opium poppies had risen to 476,710 acres from 407,715 last year, representing a 17 percent rise, it said.
Afghanistan had become “practically the exclusive supplier of the world’s deadliest drug,” accounting for 93 percent of the global opiates market, the survey said.
Opium cultivation was “closely linked” to the Taliban insurgency, using the drug economy to fund arms, logistics and pay, it said.
The survey outlined several other disturbing findings.
About 80 percent of opium poppies were grown in a handful of provinces along the border with Pakistan that see the worst unrest.
Helmand, where opium cultivation rose by 48 percent, has become the world’s biggest source of illicit drugs, surpassing the output of entire countries like Colombia (coca), Morocco (cannabis) and Burma (opium), which have populations up to 20 times larger, the UNODC said.
While production had soared across the country, 13 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces were now opium-free, double the number of last year.
UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa called on the international military forces operating in Afghanistan under the NATO umbrella to help in the fight against opium — which they have so far refused to do.
“Since drug trafficking and the insurgency live off each other, the foreign military forces operating in Afghanistan have a vested interest in supporting counternarcotics operations,” he said.
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