United Nations – Afghanistan has made some progress in cutting back on opium poppy cultivation in the past year but is still in danger of becoming a “narco state,” the director of an annual U.N. survey said Wednesday.
Afghanistan produces 87 percent of the world’s opium, and the income from production and trafficking of opium in 2005 was estimated in the report at $2.7 billion, equivalent to 52 percent of Afghanistan’s legal gross domestic product.
The report said that a combination of eradication and development of alternative uses for the land of farmers who abandon growing poppies had cut cultivation acreage by 21 percent in the past year, though overall production declined by only 2 percent because favorable weather had increased yield.
In concrete terms, the report said, 50,000 heads of households made a decision not to plant their fields with opium poppy, and one field out of five planted with an illicit opium crop in 2004 was planted with a legal crop in 2005.
The director of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said that despite the advances, “the future doesn’t look so good.”
“The threat is definitely there that the country will become a narco state,” he said. “We need a stronger commitment to eradication and stronger support for farmers so that not only are they won over to the reality that law enforcement works, but that the alternative for them is not humanitarian disaster but jobs and income.”
According to the report, most of the profits go to a very few traffickers, warlords and militia leaders rather than to the impoverished farmers. And those farmers often are heavily in debt to the warlords.
Last year, Costa said, the survey found that the principal reason farmers cited for giving up poppy cultivation was that it was against the teachings of Islam.
This year, in what Costa said he considered a good sign, the principal reasons given were fear of eradication and hope for development assistance.
He said, though, that cultivation went down only in those few areas where development assistance was available, and he feared the eradication effort was faltering.
“There is a risk that opium cultivation will not decline further,” he said.
New pledges from President Hamid Karzai to wipe out the illegal business are difficult to fulfill because of deteriorating security and the reality that many of his provincial governors and police and army chiefs profit from the trade, Costa said.