http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/asia/27afghan.html

August 27, 2008

Afghanistan's Opium Harvest Shrinks After Record Crop, U.N. Says

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghanistan's opium harvest has dropped from last year's record high, the United Nations announced Tuesday, contending that the tide of opium that engulfed Afghanistan in ever rising harvests since 2001 was finally showing signs of ebbing.

"The opium floodwaters in Afghanistan have started to recede," Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in the foreword to the 2008 edition of the annual opium survey, [1] published Tuesday. "Afghan society has started to make progress in its fight against opium," Mr. Costa added.

Poppy cultivation has dropped by 19 percent since 2007, and has fallen beneath 2006 levels as well, the report said. The harvest is also down, although by a lesser margin because of greater yields, dropping by 6 percent to an estimated 8,500 tons.

More than half of Afghanistan's provinces have now been declared poppy free -- that is, 18 of 34 provinces grow few or no poppies, up from 13 poppy-free provinces last year.

The results, gathered by the United Nations through satellite imagery and checks on the ground, are a success for the Afghan government's strategy of weaning farmers from the illicit crop through persuasion, incentives and local leadership. A drought in northern Afghanistan also helped bring numbers down, although it has also increased the hardship for farmers.

The report underscores a trend, first seen last year, in which the stabler, better-administered provinces are succeeding in curbing illicit drug production, according to diplomats and government officials. A swath of blue on a United Nations map of Afghanistan, stretching from the northeast to the northwest, now denotes a decrease in poppy cultivation or an absence of it.

Two provinces that have been large-scale poppy-producing regions in the past, Badakhshan in the north-east and Nangarhar in the east, have been declared poppy free this year, a consequence of effective local leadership and the support of religious leaders, elders and local council members, Mr. Costa said at a news briefing in Kabul on Tuesday evening.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan's poppy crop still remains the world's largest, and now 98 percent of the crop is grown in the lawless southern and southwestern regions that are in the grip of a virulent insurgency. Two-thirds of all opium in Afghanistan in 2008 was grown in Helmand Province, where the Taliban control whole districts. Eight thousand British troops working with government soldiers have failed to make much headway in curbing either Taliban activities or the drug industry.

"If Helmand were a country, it would once again be the world's biggest producer of illicit drugs," Mr. Costa wrote.

The fact that poppy and opium production is thriving in areas where the insurgency is strongest shows the link between drugs and conflict, he said, contending that both need to be dealt with at the same time. The Taliban were making up to $70 million a year taxing poppy farmers, and were collecting their share of the estimated $3 billion made yearly by the drug traffickers in Afghanistan, he said.

Mr. Costa called on NATO, the United States and the Afghan military to destroy drug laboratories, opium markets and traffickers' convoys, without harming the livelihoods of struggling farmers. Poor Afghans risk severe hunger this year after bad harvests and price increases, he said, and should be assisted before they are tempted to return to poppy cultivation.

[1] http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/opium-cultivation-in-afghanistan-down-by-a-fifth.html