UN tries to manipulate price of Afghan opium

Guardian:

United Nations officials in Afghanistan are attempting to create a "flood of drugs" in the country intended to destroy the value of opium and force poppy farmers to switch to legal crops such as wheat.

After the failure to destroy fields of the scarlet flowers in Afghanistan's volatile south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says the answer is to stop the drugs from leaving the country in the first place.

"Manual eradication is incompetent and inefficient," UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa said during a visit to the western Afghan province of Herat. "So we want to see more efforts to stop the flow of drugs across Afghanistan's borders and the hitting of high-value targets to create a market disruption.

"We want to create a flood of drugs within Afghanistan. There will be so much opium inside Afghanistan unable to go out that the price will go down."

Officials admit that the plan is a second-best solution to intensive eradication campaigns. Last year the Afghan government succeeded in destroying only 3.5% of Afghanistan's 157,000 hectares of poppy because eradication teams were either attacked or bought off by local drug lords. But the attempt to use brute economics to tackle the country's $4bn (£2.5bn) narcotics industry instead is fraught with problems – not least Afghanistan's thousands of miles of porous borders.

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While the Iranians, fed up with the problems created by the country's 1 million heroin addicts, have taken steps to build ditches and walls along the frontier, the Afghans lack even a fraction of those resources.

On the Afghan side of the border, Costa visited one of 24 squalid border checkpoints supported by a sprinkling of EU money, where the commanding officer told the UNODC chief that his men needed heavy weapons to defend themselves against the much better armed smugglers who race through the huge gaps in the border.

The task of beefing up Afghanistan's defences on this vast stretch of border is supported by just two UNODC officials, and they say that while their Afghan colleagues have been ready for months to start joint border patrols with their Iranian counterparts, progress has stalled because of bureaucratic infighting between ministries in Kabul.

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While it is interesting to see that the UN believes markets effect prices, I am skeptical of their latest "solution." I think it is also counter to the latest US and NATO strategy which is to go ofter the drub pipeline and attack the labs needed to convert the poppies to opium. Finding and destroying the labs should also effect prices depending on whether there are alternate purchasers available. If there are not the price should collapse altogether.