Cultivation of opium in Afghanistan drops

KABUL, Afghanistan — Drought and anti-drug campaigns helped slash Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation by 19 percent this year compared to 2007, but Taliban militants could still derive up to $70 million from the harvest, the U.N. anti-drug chief said Tuesday.

The country is still far and away the world's leading source of the heroin-producing crop, a new U.N. report said.

Successful anti-poppy campaigns in the country's north and east were mainly to thank for the drop in production. But fields in the south — where the Taliban insurgency is strongest — remain awash in poppies that provide the main ingredient for heroin, according to the U.N.'s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008 released Tuesday.

And because of a rise in yield, opium production this year will fall only 6 percent compared with last year's record haul and the Taliban stand to again earn tens of millions of dollars from the drug trade.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said perhaps most alarming is that he expects the Taliban and other militants to derive between $50 million and $70 million" from Afghanistan's opium and heroin trade produced based on this year's harvest.

Costa said there is no longer an Afghan poppy problem but rather a problem with the country's southern provinces, where the insurgency is strongest. He said there is such a clear link between Taliban insurgents and drug production that fighting both movements "is a complementary process."

Some 98 percent of the country's poppies were concentrated in seven southern provinces, "where there are permanent Taliban settlements, and where organized crime groups profit from the instability," the U.N. report said.

Costa estimated that the Taliban would derive up to 10 percent of the $732 million poppy harvest, and that traffickers — some tied to the insurgency — would make another $200 million moving the drug haul to the world's streets.

Still, the U.N. and other drug officials said this year's drop in cultivation are reason for cautious optimism.

"The news is relatively good," Costa told a news conference in Kabul. "The direction of change is right."

Last year opium farmers cultivated 476,903 acres; this year they cultivated 388,000 acres, the report said.