KABUL, Afghanistan — Drought and anti-drug campaigns helped slash Afghanistan’s opium poppy cultivation by 19 percent this year compared with 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 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, 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 stands again to earn tens of millions of dollars from the drug trade. The Associated Press
