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AFGHANISTAN'S opium cultivation and production declined steeply in 2008 from record highs, the US said today.
“We are very pleased to announce today the US Government estimate of poppy cultivation and opium production in Afghanistan showed substantial declines,” US President George W. Bush's anti-drug czar John Walters said.
Poppy cultivation in the insurgency-wracked nation declined by 22 per cent to 157,000ha from 202,000ha in 2007, he said. When compared to 2006, the new cultivation level marked a 10 per cent drop.
After two straight years of record opium production, Mr Walters said the estimated potential production in 2008 also plunged 31 per cent to 5500 tonnes from 8000 tonnes last year.
The number of poppy-free provinces also rose from 15 to 18 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, said Mr Walters, the director of national drug control policy.
Afghanistan produces around 90 per cent of the world's opium, used to make heroin sold in Europe and Central Asia, with profits said to feed a Taliban-led insurgency that has worsened recently.
Without referring to past differences with NATO, he indicated that the counternarcotics strategy was becoming more effective due to an international recognition that fighting drugs was critical to restoring security in Afghanistan.
NATO, leading the international fight against the Taliban, has held back in the past from taking a direct role in action to eradicate poppy fields for fear of antagonising farmers who derive their income from the crop.
But at talks in the Hungarian capital Budapest earlier this month, NATO defence ministers decided to let individual nations – on a voluntary basis – hunt down drug lords and laboratories with the consent of Kabul.
The NATO decision to directly target the opium trade could help in efforts to stop hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money from reaching the Taliban, ousted from power seven years ago by a US-led coalition, experts said.
“One of the problems we've had in the past is a recognition that both terror and violence and opium are cancers on the future of Afghanistan and have to be eradicated,” Mr Walters said.
“Although not always openly discussed, there was a view that the work on one is to undermine the other – that is to attack counternarcotics or the opium trade makes places less secure and that to make places secure, you have to look the other way on the opium trade.”
Washington, he said, had prodded the international community to “remove restrictions that in some cases have in the past prevented us working together in security and counternarcotics”.
“In short, we can't have security in Afghanistan without attacking the opium trade, we can't without also attacking corruption.
“Those three things have sometimes been elusive and they are now being more aggressively attacked by the Afghan government, the people of Afghanistan (with) the international community's help,” he said.
Ashraf Haidari, a senior Afghan embassy official, said that Kabul, with international help, was determined to eradicate the drug problem in the country's southwest, which now produced more than 90 per cent of all narcotics in Afhghanistan.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report on its annual poppy survey in August that there was a 19 per cent decrease in opium cultivation to 157,000ha, down from a record harvest of 193,000ha in 2007.
It described it as the first drop in cultivation since 2005.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24549842-12377,00.html
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